


Dangers Untold, Hardships Unnumbered

by Ankaret



Category: Labyrinth (1986), Marlow series - Forest
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miss Cartwright's choice of a Play makes Lawrie aware of the proper way to summon the Goblin King, which leads to Fob being kidnapped and threatened with being turned into a goblin. Kay, Nicola and Lawrie face the Labyrinth, Ann cleans up, and Jareth doesn't fight fair.  (He's a Goblin King.  It's not in the job description).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"Come to that, it's about time I changed into my tinsel gown and wings," chuckled Nicola. "Come and find your wand, Lawrie dear. We'll see you afterwards, Mummykins, when all the naughty gnomes have been chased away from fairyland."

\- Autumn Term, chapter 17: The Prince And The Pauper

 

The day began with rain. It was raining when Karen Dodd woke, with a confused sense of loss and panic, from a dream of looming towers and missed trains and insistent school bells. It rained throughout breakfast.

Breakfast was usually a relatively jolly meal despite Edwin's customary withdrawal behind the _Guardian_, but that morning it was blighted by Fob, who was darkly infuriated by the double slap of Kingscote's half-term being _this_ week and Westbridge Infants' _next_ week, _and_ by the half-term birds of passage not, as she had assumed, including Peter. Chas did his best to cheer things up with a relentless stream of chirpy banter about the miniature train set, free with an inordinate number of cereal-box tokens, which had been the one object of his desire for the past month. Chas had hoped and despaired daily for the whole long week since he'd sent the tokens off, _with_ a stamp he'd bought _himself_ from Mrs Peddar in The Shop. This morning, regular as the barometer, hope rose again.

"It _might_ come this morning, mightn't it, Kaykaren? And if I was to accidentally forget my lunchbox and you were to bring it up to school and the parcel had _come_..."

"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Edwin, emerging from behind his newspaper. Outside the rain redoubled. "Does the phrase _allow twenty-eight days for delivery_ mean nothing to you? And if so, how do you expect to pass your eleven-plus without a passing acquaintance with basic arithmetic?"

"It's easier for boys to get into the Grammars than girls," said Chas confidently. "Gammarlow read it in the paper."

"I will _not_ have you referring to Mrs Marlow by that ridiculous name."

"I said could I call her it and she said anything I liked as long as it wasn't Me Nan." Chas pushed the skin at the corners of his eyelids upwards with his fingers. "Me Me Nan. Me likee ridee bikee." Rose met this very juvenile sally with averted eyes and even more concentration on each dawdling spoonful of grapefruit. "And then _Methren_ said that they gave con... con_sid_eration... to people who already had a brother or a sister at one of the Grammars. So if _Rose_ gets in I should be all right."

Edwin glowered, recognising this juvenile clowning as mostly whistling in the dark, but out of patience with it none the less. Karen felt a vague impersonal tenderness towards his hopeless desires for peace at breakfast. It wasn't something she'd ever managed to achieve herself. She poured him more coffee, which gave him enough time to compose himself, snap and ruffle the newspaper shut, and say "That'll be quite enough of that. Now, Katie, about this Easter get-together of your mother's..."

Karen discussed the Easter barbecue for all she was worth, aware of the slight line between Edwin's brows that only deepened every time she paused to minister to Fob or deal with the well-meaning mess Rose was making of opening a carton of orange-juice. "Do it with the scissors, Rose."

"But it says _tear_," said Chas on Rose's behalf, as Rose scurried away in search of the kitchen scissors. "It shouldn't say tear if you can't tear it."

"It shouldn't be half-term if it's not," said Fob deeply from her own end of the table. Edwin raised an enquiring eyebrow. Karen paused, not wanting to raise the still unexploded topic of Peter. Rose, having used her own initiative, returned with a pair of embroidery scissors of Mrs Marlow's that had somehow floated between the households and fetched up in the bathroom cabinet.

"_Not_ those. The _kitchen_ scissors, Katie said."

"They're not in the drawer..." said Rose to her own slippered feet, at the same time as Fob interrupted deeply again. "No she didn't. Just _scissors_ was what she said. N' it's Monday n' I'm doing _swimming_. I need my verruca-sock."

Edwin inhaled deeply. Karen put a hand over his in wordless sympathy. Rose scurried off gratefully after the verruca-sock; Chas, with a muttered _can I get down please thankyou_ all on one breath, went to assist her. Edwin exhaled again.

"Oh, love, it's just being cooped up inside in this weather," said Karen hastily. "A walk to and from school in the puddles and a long run around in between and they'll be human again."

He gave her a glancing smile. She thought he was going to say something more, but at that moment the phone rang. Fob answered it with her usual basso profundo bellow of "Yes!"

The volume of discussion from the linen-cupboard rose to levels that made Edwin rub small circles with his fingertips over one temple. Karen took the phone away from Fob and carried it out to the hall. It was the childrens' grandmother Mrs Clavering, telling her how _nice_ it was to hear Fob in a tone that made Karen, perversely, feel as if she was at fault first for letting Fob take possession of the telephone and then for retrieving it. Mrs Clavering began a long rigmarole, which Karen paid only a dutiful minimum of attention to, concerning a party dress of Rose's accidentally left behind after a recent visit. Chas found the verruca-sock looking yellow and withered behind the boiler. He held it up, poking it doubtfully with a finger.

The front door banged. Karen felt something cold and leaden in her chest slam with it. Outside, the car started. Nothing was left of Edwin but the folded newspaper beside his breakfast-plate and a certain thunderstorm-like tension lingering in the air.

Mrs Clavering asked for a word with Rose, who said _yes, Granny_, and _I love you too_, dutifully. From there the phone passed to Chas and finally back to Fob, who bellowed "I don't think so!" and slammed it back into its cradle. Karen was crawlingly afraid that had been in response to _and does Karen want a last word with me_, but was unable to bring herself to ring back and make sure. She let it go. If she mentioned anything about the conversation at all to Edwin it would only make him make his headache face, anyway. She put the radio on. Chas boogied delightedly and turned Fob under his arm, at which Fob was so solemnly charmed that she scuttled round and made him do it again. Rose, normally so helpful about stacking plates, sat down again in Edwin's place and looked agonised.

"It's because of Assembly and her not wanting to play her recorder," explained Chas. Rose nodded, a prey to chilly apprehension at the beastly prospect.

"Oh, lord," said Karen, kneeling down so that Rose's despairing face was on a level with her own. "Is it a solo?"

Rose shook her head, unable to explain how the company of nine other young squeakers and waverers would just mean that any mistakes she made would be _noticed_, and she was certain that she would get the one evil music-stand that refused to be assembled without taking out its tribute in pinched fingers.

"How about if you play it through for me?"

Rose shook her head again and went determinedly outside to put her coat on. Fob followed.

This led into an interlude in the porch, full of stamping feet and mismatched mittens, during which the rain flung itself at them in slapping handfuls. Karen organised six small arms into the appropriate sleeves of anoraks and windcheaters, supervised the putting-on of three pairs of sticky-wet wellingtons, defused Chas's attempt at putting his coat on backwards 'because I'll be walking _into_ the wind and the rain, won't I, so the rain won't get into the zip' and made a final trip indoors for her own bag and coat. She emerged onto the porch to find Chas smiling trustfully up at her. "Are you remembering that we're getting a lift with Mrs Windsor whose Melanie's in Rose's class, and on Wednesday you're taking Melanie because of the dentist?"

Karen felt there was really no point asking where the dentist came into it. "Well, I suppose your wellies will come in handy at playtime," she said weakly.

"_Break_," said Rose hollowly.

"Yes - Break - sorry - "

Headlights flared in the rainy gloom. A four-by-four came charging up the drive, running the gauntlet of overhanging branches, and drew up in front of the house. A pale pancake face between pigtails was visible staring out at the back.

"Melanie gets sick in cars," said Chas helpfully. "I told her she couldn't be sick in ours because Daddy would hate it and she said she couldn't help it, she just _was_ sick."

"But I haven't _got_ the car on Wednesday," began Karen, and gave it up as they piled off joyously towards the four-by-four. Fob brought up the rear, trudging along clutching her bag full of swimming kit like a stoic small refugee. Mrs Windsor leaned out of the window and said something incomprehensible concerning, Karen _thought_, her mother's wretched Easter barbecue. She hoped Melanie wasn't proposing to go along and be sick at that.

The rest of the morning was mostly full of washing and lack of inspiration for what to do with the ruins of Sunday's roast chicken. Karen eyed it dislikingly and thumbed a recipe book. "Mexican... no... curried... _no..._ sandwiches, so _dull_, and Edwin doesn't like it if there isn't something hot... casserole, maybe... _chicken tetrazzini..._... oh, it needs parmesan... "

There was a knock at the door. Karen went to open it, tucking the full laundry-basket under the table with one foot as she passed. Outside the air was as grey and rough as a wet wolfhound's back and smelt of the undistant sea.

On the doorstep stood her sister Ann, bearing a handful of slightly damp post. "I met the postman at the top of the drive and said I'd save him the trouble," she explained as Karen sorted the letters. "Mummy says would the children like to come over and have tea with us? And you and Edwin if you'd _like_, but she said you'd probably be glad of the time to yourselves." She paused, message tidily delivered; and then, unasked, began folding washing.

"I'll make coffee," said Karen, deciding she liked the idea of company after all. "There wasn't a parcel?"

Ann shook her head. "Sometimes they bring them round later on with the van, though. Or I could go back through the village and ask at the post office. Is it something important?"

"Oh, no, only Chas sending off bits of cardboard to get bits of plastic," said Karen distractedly. "Does the Shop do Parmesan, do you know?"

Ann looked as if she was trying very hard to make the cardboard, the plastic and the Parmesan fit together and make something sensible. "I'm sorry, I don't think it does."

"It's not _your_ fault, Ann," said Karen, more sharply than she had intended. Ann blushed and looked disconcerted, and made noises that broadly indicated that she knew it wasn't her fault, she was just _sorry_, and would Chas be very disappointed?

"He'll get over it. Ann, I always forget - milk and sugar?"

"Both please," said Ann sedately. She continued folding the linen until it was all done except Edwin's and Chas's underpants, which were identical except for being different sizes, and then sat down at the table. As it happened, Ann was the only member of the family who regularly wrote to Karen from Kingscote - Nicola wrote only to their mother and _very occasionally_ Peter; Ginty, Karen vaguely still presumed, to Patrick Merrick, and Lawrie to no one at all unless coerced - so there were things Karen could ask about teams and exams that had been mentioned in letters, and the School Choir entering a Festival and Miss Ussher, from the sound of it, being altogether more enthusiastic about the whole affair than Miss Keith.

"And they've made volunteering more or less compulsory," said Ann without, Karen thought wonderingly, any irony whatever. "I mean, you have to do it unless you're doing five A's or spending every free hour over at the Conservatoire or have a home letter saying you're not to. Nick hated the idea of it, but it turned out the Home they assigned her and her friend Miranda to had _three_ old sailors in it and she's in seventh heaven. One of them's showing her how to make a ship in a bottle."

"Hasn't she _got_ a ship in a bottle? I thought there was mad rejoicing that Giles had found one for her."

"Perhaps it's different if it's your own," said Ann peaceably, drinking coffee. "It's not the same Home I go to, it's all the way across Wade on the other side of the bypass, and I think that helps."

Karen regarded her over the coffee. She had never been sure whether Ann _knew_ that Nicola didn't much like her. Come to that, she didn't suppose Nicola had much time for _her_, either, not these days. It gave her an odd, unsettled, empty feeling. "What's Lawrie doing?"

"Special dispensation because of the Play." Ann went into obliging detail about the Play. It sounded to Karen as if Cartwright had finally been allowed to have her way and indulge her penchant - inexplicable in such a generally _sensible_ woman - for fairies and flowers. Lawrie, from the sound of things, was having the time of her life slinking and stamping around playing a goblin king, and her friend Tim was in charge of some puppets.

"_Puppets_?" asked Karen, raising both eyebrows.

"Oh - no - they're really quite... eerie, I suppose. And the girl playing the lead is awfully good."

"Better than Lawrie?" asked Karen sceptically.

"Oh, no. Well. _No_. But I think she might be quite a find for Kempe, in her quiet way. Pomona something. She looks... well, as if she hasn't any horizons above steak and kidney pie, really..." Ann blushed at being the deliverer of even such a mild character judgment, "... but it makes it feel _real_, to have someone so matter-of-fact walking along amongst all these odd creations and treating them as if she'd just met them in the queue for a bus. In as much as it can be real," she qualified hastily, for Ann was one of those well-balanced people who never forgot that she was watching actors on a stage. She struggled to articulate what she meant. "And you can tell when she's play-acting - saying 'Goblin king, goblin king, wherever you may be, take this child of mine far away from me!' - "

"They're never letting one of the Fourths play an unwed mother."

"Oh, no, no, it's her brother, I think... and then when she says 'I wish the Goblin King would come and take you away _right now_' you can tell she's _not_. It's really terribly clever. And Lawrie's very good, of course."

Karen listened politely, though it all sounded pretty footling to her.

After Ann left, the afternoon drifted away - it would have to be sandwiches after all or else cold chicken and chips, and she'd just _brave_ Edwin's scowls - and then it occurred to Karen that she had no idea whether Mrs Windsor was giving the children a lift home, and she didn't have her number. She decided to walk to the school anyway, as staying in the house was suddenly wholly unendurable. And she had to walk the dog, anyhow.

After negotiating the pother of Collecting Time at school - at which there was no Mrs Windsor and no loitering Melanie either, so Karen assumed gladly that they'd just gone off together - Karen deposited the children with Ann, who made a glad fuss, and Ginty, who didn't. She hurried away before she had to talk to Rowan; or to her mother, who would immediately know something was wrong.

Tramping down the lane with her hands in her pockets, Karen thought despairingly that that really was ridiculous, as there _wasn't_ anything wrong, or at least nothing she could put her finger on. She loved Edwin, difficult as he was; she supposed she loved the children, it was awful to think of them being brought up by someone who _didn't_ love them, and it was ridiculous to be this discouraged by leftovers or washing or Fob's foul verruca sock.

It occurred to her with a lifting of spirits that her mother would probably run the children home later, so she and Edwin could drive out to a restaurant in Colebridge, and she could have something divinely fussy that didn't taste as objectively good as Edwin's steak but was all the better seasoned for someone else having had the trouble. She took the rest of the lane at a brisk stride, feeling as if something the weight of a heavy knee-gripping Fob had been lifted from her shoulders. She thought she saw an owl as she turned towards the drive, the first one she'd ever seen in the daytime; but it was gone when she looked again, so perhaps she'd imagined it.

She returned to an unpaid-for parish magazine on the doormat and an ominous blinking light on the answering machine. Karen lifted the receiver, full of foreboding. It was a terse message from Edwin saying he'd have to work late. He worked late a lot, these days. He'd be back when he could, and she was to pray the road between Westbridge and Streweminster didn't flood. Karen, looking out of the window with a practiced eye at the general unsettled greyness, thought the flood pretty inevitable, and was caught between disappointment and relief.

The children came in late and bumptious and full of chocolate cake and tales of Lawrie's spine-chilling goblinishness. Karen thought to herself as she supervised Fob's bath that if she heard Chas say 'Bog of Eternal Stench' one more time she would certainly drown herself. But he did, and she didn't. She dried Fob instead, and ushered her into pyjamas.

"Where will you go when you go away?" asked Fob deeply.

This was one of those Fob questions, and deeply unanswerable. Karen tried anyway. "On holiday, do you mean, Fob?"

Fob looked up at her with toffee-button eyes, unreadable as a Tierra del Fuegian watching the _Beagle_ beach on the sand. "No, when you go away and Mummy comes back."

Karen sat down on the side of the bath. She felt that if she didn't, her knees might give way all on their own. Outside, faintly, she could hear Chas galumphing up and down the stairs re-enacting some battle or other. Someone - by process of elimination Rose - tapped on the door. "Um, Kay? Little Black Sambo ate the Parish Magazine, and now he's sicked it up over Daddy's accounts box."

Karen put her head between her hands. "I wish the goblins _would_ come and take you away," she whispered through her fingers. "Right now."


	2. Chapter 2

It was midnight when Rowan, doing the farm rounds, was accosted by what she at first thought was the Irish tramp rumoured to be lurking in the neighbourhood, but which turned out instead to be Rose and Chas Dodd with a wild tale of Fob and Karen disappearing out of a locked bathroom.

It was two in the morning when the police were let into the farmhouse by Mrs Marlow with the spare keys, and broke down the door of the bathroom to find a closed window, a scarf that Mrs Marlow didn't think was Kay's, and a baffling, deadening silence.

It was six when the police came back, to interview everybody from young Steve Penny (who had shown up in the kitchen with his mother's hospitable offer to come and Help Out at the Easter barbecue and a half-dozen new-bloomed double-yolker eggs, and was astonished to be part of the proceedings) to a Ginty who was so jumpy and ill-at-ease that, as Rowan kindly said, it was a wonder they didn't clap her in irons on the spot. It was seven-fifteen when Mrs Marlow decided that, under the circumstances, it was probably best if Rose and Chas didn't go to school.

"Poor old girl," said Chas tentatively to Rose, who was fighting back tears and refusing toast and jam.

"I think it was _him_," said Rose uncertainly. "Uncle Gerry."

"Oh, _Rose_, no." Mrs Marlow swooped in. Nicola, Lawrie and Ginty decided, silently and separately, that now was time to leave the table.

Ginty, disconcerted in equal measures by the police and the plum-cheeked admiringness of young Steve Penny, went off to write to Monica. The twins, motivated by a sudden childish and twinnish desire to play Ludo, went up to the sitting-room; which meant they could see through the window when Edwin arrived looking bleak and rumpled, having spent the night in a hotel in Streweminster and only just managed to brave the floods and force a passage through the slow throngs of cars on the motorway home. The police returned. Edwin left with them.

Lawrie gawped eagerly out of the window. "You are the most gruesome ghastly ghoul," said Nicola hotly, giving her a shove away from the pane.

"I want to see whether they push his head down getting into the car like on _The Sweeney_," protested Lawrie. "You've knocked over the Ludo board, look. Oh well. I was winning."

"No, you weren't," said Nicola automatically. Despite what she had said to Lawrie, she found herself going back to kneel on the window-seat and watch the tail-end of the police car departing up the drive. Everyone in the village would have a field day, she thought, suspecting every kind of Trouble Up At The Big House from wholesale pot in the conservatory to murder; though, actually, she supposed Steve Penny would put them all right sooner rather than later.

Lawrie collected up board, dice and tiddlywink counters, and found herself at the end, to her consternation, one green counter short. "Come and help me look," she said pathetically. "I think it's under the sofa. Your arms are longer than mine."

"How can my arms be longer than yours, you clot? You're just afraid of spiders and crumbs," said Nicola, but she obligingly put one arm under the sofa and ferreted around for the lost token anyway. She eventually found it right at the tips of her fingers; made a long arm, thought her shoulder was trapped, realised with her usual good sense that it wasn't (Lawrie, under similar circumstances, would have flailed like a pinned moth and made it all worse) and emerged again triumphant.

"_Just_ like Rowan birthing calves," said Lawrie.

Nicola gave her an odd look, but Lawrie obviously intended a great compliment by this strange mode of expressing herself; so she flipped the counter up in her hand and over onto her knuckles, said "Who'd have thought that's what sofas have by way of young?" and handed it to Lawrie with a deep, hand-on-heart bow. Her thoughts, unbidden, returned to Edwin. "I should think the police will be quite civil to him, prob'ly. They were to us. I mean, it's not like they think he's done away with her and Fob."

"_All my pretty chickens and their dam too_... Actually, _I'd_ probably think they _would_ suspect him. They usually do suspect the husband, don't they, in thrillers and things?"

"And it almost never is," countered Nicola swiftly.

"It was with the Brides in the Bath boy,"

"Well, Karen isn't a Bride in the Bath."

"She was a Bride in the Bath_room_."

"Oh, _drop_ it, Lal, can't you?"

Ginty appeared dramatically in the doorway. "You know what Ma's doing?" she demanded.

"Mopping up Rose?" suggested Nicola.

"Ringing Keith, to ask if we can go back to school for the rest of the half-term. Can you imagine anything worse?"

"I suppose we'll have to tell people why before Keith does," said Nicola, facing the worst with her usual hardiness. "I hope she doesn't have an Assembly about it, or anything."

"I bet she will." Ginty sat down on the edge of the sofa and looped her hands round her knees. "I bet we have to _pray_ for her in Chapel."

Nicola's heart gave a sick sideways thump. She remembered the horrors of that day in Oxford looking for Rose; and behind them, unwillingly, the pale, intent, _possessed_ look on Patrick's face in the Old Shippen that time; and behind _that_, battleship-grey as the morning mist, the lighthouse, and Lieutenant Foley, and... all that. No matter how hard people like Ann pretended that everything would be all right, sometimes it _wasn't_. Sometimes things _happened_ to people.

Lawrie's voice, clear and unsubdued, was like lime juice on an open cut. "Rowan reckons she's left him."

"And taken _Fob_?" asked Ginty, sceptically. "Besides, I don't believe for a ten thousand millionth of a microsecond that Rowan confided in you."

"No more she did," said Lawrie, unabashed. "I heard her telling Giles on the phone. Do you want to know what _I_ think?"

"_No,_" said Nicola swiftly, head ducked forward like Sprog being unsure of his surroundings. "Stop being so foul, Lal. Just _stop_."

"You were the one who always liked Kay best," added Ginty, making common cause with Nicola for once. "You ought to be the one worrying about her if anyone is, except that you've always been totally self-centred."

Nicola realised, distantly, two things; first, that twinnish irritation at Ginty wading in unasked-for-like had almost, but not quite, extinguished her own irritation with Lawrie; and secondly, that Ginty was still flaring like a badly-nailed-up firework with fright and couldn't be held responsible. She turned to Lawrie, wearily expecting tears.

Instead, Lawrie looked aggravatingly perky. She put the tip of her tongue out at Ginty and said in a Mrs Bertie voice "You're one to talk, missy," and then in her own "Doesn't _anyone_ want to know what _I_ think it is?"

"Go on, then," said Ann unwarily, coming in with a library book to be tucked back into its place on the allotted shelf. It was a P.G Wodehouse. Nicola thought dislikingly that perhaps Ann didn't think it was appropriate for a time like this, and made a mental note to snag it herself the moment Ann had made her alternative choice.

"_I_ think," announced Lawrie, "that it was _him_. The Goblin King."

"Oh, Lal," said Ann helplessly and collapsed onto the sofa beside Ginty.

_"Honestly,"_ said Nicola, making herself as small in the window-seat as possible like Jane Eyre and wishing she could pull the curtain between herself and the lot of them.

"No, but listen. The scarf. The one they found. It's just like the one in the play. The scarf-that-turns-into-a-snake. Tim showed me how they do it with the lights, it's..."

"Are you _sure_, Lawrie?" Ann demanded. "Because we ought to tell the police."

"What, that she was kidnapped by an evil cabal of Cartwright, Ussher and Kempe?" asked Ginty incredulously. "Don't be so fatuous. They'd drag Lawrie off and lock her in a cell for wasting police time, _and_ not for the first time, either. Mum'd be livid. It'd practically count as getting a record."

"A record?" asked Lawrie, wide-eyed, visibly imagining Desert Island Discs.

"A _police_ record, clot. Though I s'pose if it _is_ the same scarf and the school knew which shop it came from..."

Lawrie bounced up and down in her chair. "It's out of the Costume Box. I don't know how it got there, Tim says it's not on the inventory. It's the same one. I got a good look when they were asking if any of us had seen it before. I _know_."

"And you didn't tell anyone? Oh, _Lawrie_," said Ann.

"Well, I'd tell Tim if she was here, but she's not, so I'm telling you."

There was an owl outside the window. In the _daytime_. Nicola watched it, liking both its similarity and differences to the grand family of raptors, but also feeling a faint unease. It shouldn't be there. Perhaps it had been blown off course by yesterday's gales or somehow discommoded by the flooding. Perhaps there was a sanctuary they could take it to, or a wildlife place.

If only Patrick were home from Broomhill. But Broomhill, apparently, didn't believe in half-terms, and even if they did, Patrick was just as likely to hang around and ride Blackleg, or settle down in their library to indulge his new-minted passion for comparative linguistics. It was just like music, or so he said, except that it didn't make him cry. "Except for the weird theories about Basque having features in common with obscure tribal languages of Papua New Guinea, those do make me cry," he said, and Nicola had suspected a put-on, though it was hard to tell down the phone when she couldn't see the way the corners of his mouth turned inward when he was reabsorbing a joke.

_Just like music, huh_, thought Nicola now, disbelieving again. As far as she was concerned the sooner the world took up Esperanto or Seaspeak the better, and _she_ was going in for maths and science, thank you all so much.

She wasn't sure whether she wished Patrick was here or not. He would hate it, for sure, all the visitors and the _fuss_. She wondered whether this kind of kafuffle ever involved one's Member of Parliament, and discovered that she didn't know; and watched the wagging branches and the owl.

Behind her in the room, they were still arguing. "This is just like Gondal and I'm not having it," said Nicola, flinging herself to her feet. "If we're going back to school, I'm going to _pack_."

"I'll do yours," offered Ann.

_I wish goblins would carry _you_ off_, thought Nicola. She didn't say it. But she gave Ann a look made of cold blue splinters, and the air felt suddenly still around them, as if a great attentiveness were fixed on them from a place they couldn't see.

\--

"Say your right words," said a goblin in a scraping, incantatory whisper.

The goblin he was sitting on sat up, as far as she could, and scratched her scaly left ear. "She won't say her right words. She's just like the other one."

The first goblin frowned. "But that one _did_ say her right words. She's still dancing with Himself in the..."

"Ssssh!"

\--

"Well, _I'm_ going down to the stables," said Ginty, detaching herself with snake-out-of-skin neatness from whatever row was in the offing. "I know one thing, and that's that Mum won't be at _all_ sympathetic if I don't perform my duties by Catkin. Coming, Lal?"

"What for? I saw to the Idiot before breakfast."

Ginty made an expressive face over her shoulder, indicating astonishment that such obliviousness could have survived to the age of fourteen and three quarters, as she left.

"You needn't be so beastly, Nick," said Ann in a constrained voice.

Nicola felt her cheeks flame. Conscious of wrongdoing, unwilling to accept the excuse _but I didn't even say anything_ that popped unbidden out of some baby part of her brain, irritated with herself and Lawrie and Ann in equal measures, she turned and pressed her cheek against the cold casement. "Look, just _drop_ it, can't you?" she muttered, sounding ungracious even to herself.

Ann stood up and took two tentative steps towards her. "I know you're worried about Karen - " Nicola writhed inwardly, both _Yes I am_ and _No I'm not_ being, for different reasons, impossible - "but _honestly_, ever since Christmas you've treated me like a _worm_ \- "

_Have not, have not_, Nicola's thoughts protested sickly to themselves, though she knew she had. She felt as if she was fighting off a rising fever.

" - and, well, I'm pretty tired of it. That's all." Ann blushed. "Do you want me to do your packing?"

Probably, on any other day, the row would have petered out there into mutters of _huh_ and _m'sorry_ and removal of oneself into a room where one's grisly sister wasn't. That day, with the thundery weather and the lack of sleep and the formless, hunched spectre of what might have happened to Karen hanging over them, it flared like tinder.

"Oh, you are the total _limit_!" Nicola boosted herself down out of the window-seat. The words seemed to be pushing to the front of her mouth in a horrible rush, without any effort at all on her part. She wondered whether this was what being Tim felt like, though she had a prickling feeling that with Tim it was all a lot more premeditated and more precise. "How can you want to do packing for somebody you hate? Do you _like_ feeling martyred? Or do you just like the way it makes the rest of us uncomfortable?"

"I don't hate you," said Ann, palpably embarrassed. "I was offering to do your packing to - to smooth things over. But since you _have_ brought it up, well, I can't help saying it, I think it was _wrong_. Peter and Giles and Edward could have died."

"Is that why it was wrong?" Nicola enquired coldly. "Or is it because you're such a law-abiding type? If there's another war you could be a collaborator like anything."

"Now you're twisting my words," said Ann unhappily. She smoothed the front of her skirt with her hands. "You're still my sister and I still love you, no matter what happens."

Nicola's cheeks flamed with embarrassment. How _could_ anyone stand to hear themselves talk like that? "It's not because they nearly died that you've been flouncing about like a wet hen since Christmas. It's because we went off and _wouldn't play with you_. Anyone would think you were Fob's age." She felt as if she were fighting her way through wet washing. She stared coldly at her sister's flustered face, even more annoyed by Ann's helpless small cringe at the mention of Fob. "You know, sometimes I can't believe you're even part of this family!"

"Neither can I," said Ann in a stifled voice.

Lawrie put her oar in. "Oh, just say it. I wish," she prompted, evoking with a pause, a cupped arm and an indrawn breath the whole stage and the theatre and the presence of Daphne Morris and Gemma Ford being baby noises off. Her eyes glittered like those of a fey thing. "I wish - I wish the goblins would come and take you away right now."

The air turned still again. Nicola had the oddest feeling that the rest of the house had ceased to exist, or at the very least was sealed off from them as thoroughly as they themselves were sealed off from the past Marlows who totted up shillings and pence and bemoaned lost cows and slacking stable-hands and pursued their family grievances through the farm log.

There was a man in the room. He was tall, and fair, but with nothing like Peter or Giles' decently tidy good looks. Instead, he looked... _outlandish_, Nicola thought, no other word presenting itself. Something about him reminded her of the owl outside, though she couldn't think what. Perhaps it was the aloofness or the silence, or the way that once again her mind stubbed its toe and tripped, and thought, _you shouldn't be here_. She wondered confusedly whether he could be the Irish tramp they'd heard about; she'd had rather kindly feelings towards the tramp, all things considered, and had been willing to find him a blanket and a thermos if she found him in a corner of the barn, but she had no kindly feelings at all towards this peacock intruder.

He was dressed, she thought scornfully, as if for a pantomime. Except that she couldn't help seeing that his coat with its high outcurved collar - which she would have thought fairly fab, had it been safely in a case under hushed lights in a costume museum - was made of hundreds of shaped and stitched pieces of leather and lined with something the colour of a November sky reflected in a cold sea. It was nothing at all like the overworked garments that came out of Jennings' cupboard for Play after Play after Play.

But it did remind her of something. Lawrie, prancing and parading in a spiked waterfall of a wig and a coat reworked out of Prospero's robes from _The Tempest_ the year before.

"You're him!" crowed Lawrie delightedly. "Jareth. The Goblin King!"

"You know who I am." His voice was bored. One of his eyes was darker than the other. Nicola stared at him sceptically, as this was something she'd hitherto only met in books, though then again she'd thought yellow eyes were an authorial weirdness until she met Patrick. She realised that _actually_, no, one of his pupils was bigger than the other. She wasn't sure that was possible either, in books or out of them.

He held out a hand, palm upward, to Ann, in a gesture that up until then Nicola had only seen in paintings. Ann began to drift across the room towards him with small sleepwalking steps that struck Nicola as more suited to a farthingale than Ann's neat dull corduroy skirt.

"This isn't happening," Nicola said huskily. "It's because I didn't get any sleep, or something. Or Lawrie put horse-pills in my breakfast for a joke. Or - "

"Huh?" said Lawrie, sounding more flabbergasted than hurt.

Jareth ignored Nicola. He made a polite, small, distant bow of his head to Lawrie. With a cold remembrance like windchill in her throat, she recalled the great candle-scented darkness of Wade Minster, and how her imagination had peopled it with worshippers and hawks. He seemed to belong far more to that world than this. But the Ludo box with its scuffed corners was still on the footstool, and the library books in their stiff shiny covers on the shelf. Nicola blinked, _hard_, in the hope that this strange double vision would all go away. It didn't.

"I want my sister back, if it's all the same to you," she said firmly.

The Goblin King tilted his head, balancingly, reminding her of Regina. "What's said is said."

"_Lawrie_ said it, and you can't trust _her_ to tell you when the kettle's boiled."

"Oi," interjected Lawrie.

Ann laid her hand in his gloved palm, which gave Nicola a nasty jolt; it was such a very un-Annish thing to do. The Goblin King looked down searchingly into Ann's face. She stared back up at him like a tranced thing. He reached down with his other hand, lover-like, and flicked her nose. "I think I'll keep her. She can look after the child."

He lifted Ann's hand in his, spread his other hand against the small of her cardiganed back, and swung her round as if they were dancing. It was as if a wind had risen in the room, smelling of sun-baked earth and desolation. Something rushed in Nicola's ears, and she was never certain afterwards whether it was the wind - if there was a wind - outside them or the blood within. For an absolutely horrified moment Nicola thought he was going to kiss Ann - the idea of _anyone_ ever kissing Ann was unlikely and blush-making enough in itself, without added weirdness and goblins - but instead, he swung his cloak out as he made the half-turn back again, and Ann was gone.

_Gone_. Like Karen was gone, out of a locked room with a locked bathroom window. Edwin was always very hot on window-locks. Demented as it all was, Nicola was beginning to believe it. "Have you got Fob?" she demanded truculently.

He made a little acknowledging bow. "Why, yes. I was going to turn her into a goblin, but someone seems to have beaten me to it,"

Nicola gritted her teeth. "You can't go round stealing my sisters!"

He raised a painted eyebrow. "Why not? You appear to have a glut of them, and people keep asking me to take them away."

"Oh, look, this is _ludicrous_," said Nicola, out of patience with all of it. "Are you a friend of Ellen Holroyd's or something?"

"Is that what they're calling it these days?" he enquired amusedly. "I'm not a _fairy_. Though I do bite, if you ask me nicely."

"That's disgusting, you're old enough to be our father."

His voice was silken and slippery and immeasurably tired. "I'm old enough to be your fifty-greats-grandsire, child. I was old before they first built this farm on this hill. You are no match for me. Go back to your Play and your horses and your ships. Forget about your sister."

"No," said Nicola sturdily. "I won't. And Lawrie won't either, _will_ you, Lawrie?"

"For_get_ about the _ba_by," Lawrie murmured to herself, testing out the fairy-tale beat of it.

Nicola took another step forward. "I know what happens next, if it's anything like Cartwright's play. You give us thirteen hours to solve your Labyrinth and take back the child that was stolen."

"You're well informed," he said neutrally.

"So we'll do it in seven." She dragged the unwilling Lawrie forward by the hand. "Me and Lawrie. And you give us back Fob _and_ Karen _and_ Ann. And no turning any of them into a goblin in the meantime. Is it a deal?"


	3. Chapter 3

Karen was dancing. She felt half drugged with tiredness, but it was a euphoric tiredness, nothing like the irritating prickly weariness that came from expending her life's energies on too many small things that would all need doing again tomorrow. She was wearing a dress like a white-blue cloud - a dress like the wedding gown she'd never, for good and sufficient reasons, had - and a confection like spun-sugar-silver in her short fair hair.

Every now and again the music changed. Sometimes it was swoopingly sweet but with a disturbing plangent edge that she didn't know how to take. Sometimes it was - minor? modal? Ann, she supposed, would know. Sometimes it sounded like the music from the Merricks' radio. Sometimes the ballroom looked like the one at Mariot Chase, sometimes like a strange, tattered pavilion of cream-white and ice-white silk draped with dangling strings of pearls, and sometimes, bemusingly, she seemed to be waltzing in the hushed octagonal classics library of her Oxford college. But the people there were always the same. They wore eighteenth-century finery and strange feral masks. They smelt of musk and death.

She wasn't quite sure how she had come to the ballroom. She remembered running forever through honey-coloured stone mazes, hearing Fob's distant, angry sobbing. She'd had completely _demented_ conversations, many of them with garden furniture. She had been chased down corridors by a great lolloping black beast that was partly Sam the dog with the Parish Magazine still wet on his chops and partly the Hound of Heaven, a poem she'd always regretted having read. When she dropped down a trapdoor to avoid it, she'd been chased _again_, by what turned out to be two goblins pedalling madly at the back of a thing that looked like a baroque seventh-generation ancestor of Mrs Windsor's four-by-four whilst another goblin in a pigtailed Viking wig worked a squirt gun. She'd had tea with a small blue worm. She'd been flustered, and cold, and still damp from Fob's bathwater, and absolutely certain that she had blundered onto some ghastly television show and was making all kinds of a fool of herself in front of millions.

Eventually she found her way up a different ladder and back into the world above. The dampness and the flusterment both bloomed away in the sun, leaving her rather crumpled but in presentable order. She investigated every suspicious bulge in the high box hedges and every suspicious crevice in the stonework, but none of them harboured a camera. Most did harbour _something_ which bit her or swore at her or on one occasion dissolved part of her fingernail, or else ghastly caches of goblin leavings; but a few months' experience with the things Fob and Chas - not so much Rose, still at heart a tidy town child - brought home and kept under their beds stood her in good stead there.

There were puzzles. Karen had always been _good_ at puzzles, from holiday diversions called things like Bumper Family Fun when she was barely past the colouring-book stage all the way up to the cryptic crossword in the paper, which Edwin left for her, and the sudoku which she left for him, though sometimes she solved it on the back of an envelope anyway. She wasn't _as_ competent when put on the spot with no time for reflection, but still, she'd bluffed her way through. She'd used the cool impersonal logic which she found it so easy to tune her mind to - like a favourite radio station - and the guile she was born with and which no one ever seemed to notice.

But she couldn't quite remember how she'd got here.

It didn't matter. She was here now, dancing in the arms of the man in the mask. She had been awake for at least twenty-four of anyone's hours. She was so tired that it was easier to dance than stop. She would just rotate slowly here, preserved in her own weariness like syrup. Surely, some time soon, the music would stop, and she would push the mask back with both her loving hands.

And the man behind it would be Edwin.

\--

"There, see. _She_ won't get no further," said an observing goblin wisely.

Another larger goblin leaned over his shoulder. They were watching the scene through one of the King's crystal bubbles. Himself didn't usually leave them lying around the castle, but he was so generally untidy in his habits that every century or two one went missing, and then, in the goblins' opinion, as far as entertainment went it was better than pit-fighting. You could use them to look at any place in the Labyrinth or outside it, or up your own nose, or into dreams. After a few days the bubbles generally turned into something venomous without warning, or vanished altogether in a foul smell that turned anyone who smelt it an embarrassing shade of puce, but the goblins felt it was worth it.

"Ar, her won't," the second goblin agreed and rubbed his shinbone, which was still bruised where Fob had kicked it. He stared darkly upwards, towards the nursery in the topmost tower. What was _usually_ the topmost tower. Sometimes Himself moved them around to be awkward. "So we're stuck with _that_, are we?"

The first goblin nodded gloomily. "He _likes_ her. Making heiress apparent noises, he is."

The second goblin looked deeply appalled. "It'll be just like in Himself's gran's time. Knights poundin' on the gatehouse door every two minutes. All scrubbed teeth and shiny hair and convinced every time they're going to take her home to bear their heirs and be an interestin' family legend, and you know who had to clear up the mess when she'd finished with them. Young girls is much more restful."

"You can't call her up there restful. I'd forgotten how much _noise_ a human child could make."

"Well, at least she don't _clank_ so much." The first goblin peered back at the small figures revolving mistily inside the crystal. "Is His Awful Highness _usually_ that short?"

"Oh, that's just a figment," said a third goblin, this one of a bony balancing build that seemed to mostly consist of spiky kneecaps. It cuffed them both round the ear by way of greeting. "Do human children usually have chocolate fingers for breakfast? That's what it says it wants."

"Spose we can probably find her fingers off _something_," agreed the first and smallest goblin, reluctantly relinquishing the crystal. "Will troll do?"

\--

"Seven hours," repeated Nicola staunchly. "Well?"

"It wasn't you I made a bargain with," Jareth said lightly.

"It was me who _wanted_ you to take Ann," Nicola admitted with a clench in her breath. "Lawrie was just saying. Seven hours. Take it or leave it."

"And if I should leave it, what happens to your sisters and the child?"

"I think our next plan is probably to try and exorcise you," said Nicola honestly. "Bell, book and candle stuff."

Surprisingly, he laughed. It made his face look less predatory - almost _nice_, if she'd met it introduced by Kempe and giving a talk on stage makeup, or as one of Jan Scott's hairy monster brother's rock band. She was glad to have been forewarned. "It's been tried. Very well."

He waved a bored hand, encased in leather and point-lace cuffs. Nicola was never sure quite how it happened, but they were all standing together on a sloping stumble of parched, Mediterranean-looking earth. Hot sunlight that had nothing to do with the desolate February outside the sitting-room window trickled down her neck.

Before them the slope led down to the outer stone walls of a maze that stretched from horizon to horizon. Nicola started trying to remember what it looked like from above, for later, though she was sure she'd never memorise it all. It wasn't _all_ stone - there were patchwork places the colours of rock and brick and grass - but it was too distant to see for sure. At the centre rose the castle, poking up like an irregular-shaped quartz crystal out of rock. The Play's sets were nothing to this.

"Coo, it looks like a giant brain," said Lawrie helpfully.

"How would you know?" asked Nicola swiftly. She looked combatively back and up at the Goblin King. He was leaning against a tree looking amused. As if he hadn't been amused in a very long time, and was savouring remembering what it felt like. On the tree hung a clock with seven hours marked on it. Nicola was reminded of the thirteen-hour clock in the play, which the conscientious member of Upper VB whose responsibility it was generally - according to Tim - turned either too far or not far enough, and _that_ reminded her of the not-quite-juggling business Lawrie was supposed to be learning, twice a week and very much on her good behaviour, from a retired fire-eater who, very improbably indeed, was an old friend of Miss Ferguson's father.

She looked at him suspiciously. The edges of the leather coat and the tips of his extravagant hair ruffled in the wind. "Aren't you going to do the thing with the crystal ball that you flip to and fro in your fingers and offer us our dreams?"

His eyes rested on Lawrie. "She lives so much in her dreams already." He looked almost regretful; and then the snap was back in his voice. "And as for you, I don't suppose you'd know your own dreams if they walked up behind you and said - "

"Boo!" put in a goblin from under a bush behind Nicola. Lawrie jumped and exclaimed extravagantly. When Nicola looked back at the Goblin King, he had taken off a Hornblower-like hat that she hadn't noticed he had about him, and his coat looked distinctly more naval in design. Lace the colour of bone frothed at his throat. He clapped the hat to his chest and bowed to her. "Very well. They're in my castle beyond the goblin city. You have seven hours to solve my Labyrinth or lose them all. Forever."

"Such a pity," said Lawrie reflexively under her breath.

He dropped the hat neatly onto Lawrie's head. It fell down over her eyebrows. "Don't you encourage..." began Nicola, not sure whether she was telling off the real Jareth or the hopeful copy. Lawrie, already sun-dazzled and now off-balance and half blinded, stumbled; tripped over a tree root that, Nicola indignantly thought, had to be at least a yard away from where Lawrie's feet started; fell into an arm-waving panic and slipped and slid away down the hill. Nicola hurried after her. By the time she had finished hauling Lawrie to her feet and slapping dust off her and telling her that no, her ankle wasn't broken (and throwing away the foul hat, which Lawrie then aggravatingly declared she'd _wanted_) there was no tall figure standing with folded arms at the top of the hill.

"I _hate_ him," said Nicola firmly and started off down the hill towards the Labyrinth.

It was a surprisingly long walk to the outer walls. Vines spread over the dank brownish stone, clinging to odd surfaces and scraps of mortar. There was a small pool a little way off. By common consent, they followed the walls towards it.

"I don't suppose you have a copy of the Play by you, do you?" enquired Nicola, this always being a possibility, Lawrie often having copies of plays about her person. "It might tell us how to get in."

Lawrie shook her head and made a small hieratic show of despondment. "But I know how most of Pippin's bits go," she added, reviving. "You can't not, when she's forever saying them at you. I say, I am _glad_ they cast Pippin and not that Monica woman of Gin's. It's terrifically hard trying to tempt and torment someone who looks like at you like you're _quite_ beneath her notice."

Nicola stopped in her tracks. A small winged fairy swooped past her. She didn't take any notice of it beyond vaguely thinking what a nuisance those would be if they got loose on one's cricket nets and bred. "Do Monica's face," she said.

Lawrie obligingly raised her eyebrows a little and flatly spread her mouth into the tolerant but distinctly no-nonsense smile that was only a small part of why everyone in her year thought Monica Eliot was an absolute shoo-in, when their turn came round, for Head Girl.

"Good. Next time we see the Goblin King I'm going to look just like that."

"I'll do it better than you," said Lawrie matter-of-factly. "I say, he _has_ got under your skin."

"He - has - not. And they wouldn't have given a part that big to somebody in Upper VA, anyway," Nicola explained kindly to her poor dolt of a sister. "Or anyone in the Sixth either. Exams."

"They let Jan play Prospero."

"Oh - well - _Jan_ -" Nicola kicked up sandy earth under her feet. "And Gerry Hume, I suppose, but she'd already got into that needlework place of hers. So what happens here in the Play, then? I've no idea which bit comes in which order."

"No more have Jennings' sets people," said Lawrie with a reminiscent giggle. "Last rehearsal before half-term they dropped the wrong cloth and all the ball people came waltzing into the oubliette. And then _just_ as Kempe was about to explode, in walked the Lambert with a gaggle of Prospective Parents taking in our award-winning theatre on the way between the San and the swimming-pool. I don't know which one of them looked crosser. Though like Kempe said afterwards, at least the Conservatoire lot and the folk women all look _relatively_ healthy and appealing, which is more than you could say if you took a random cross-section."

"Fish pie and bean stodge will do that to you," said Nicola, not more than mildly interested. "Do get on with it, Lal. What happens next?"

The pool bubbled slightly. Lawrie was distracted; and then, obligingly, returned to the matter in hand. Nicola ran her hand along the wall, testing for doors, as she listened. "Oh, Claire Freeman comes on with the dwarf-head on."

"Who's Claire Freeman?"

"_You_ know. Bunty Penfold's mate from IIIA, the tiny one with all the gymnastics medals on her jacket."

"I don't know, I'm sure. The Thirds all look the same to me," Nicola seized on a hopeful-looking sticking-out lump of wall and tried to rotate it. Nothing happened. "So what does Claire Freeman do?"

"Oh, she's shooting the fairies, and Pippin says how _horrid_ she is and tries to rescue one of the fairies and it bites her,"

"I bet she enjoys that," said Nicola, who was aware, though she couldn't say _how_, of the vein of amusement at her fairy-bothering former self which ran silent and deep inside Pomona.

"Yes, she does - and then she bribes Hoggle the dwarf with the 'laccy bead bracelet - Kempe had to buy about twelve of them because they only came in packets, and a good thing too, the Thirds lose the blessed things like you wouldn't believe - and Hoggle opens the gate for her. Or maybe the bribing comes later, I forget. But it's definitely the dwarf who lets her in."

Nicola put her hands in her pockets and pivoted on her heels, looking from one side to the other of the walled horizon. No dwarf appeared, conveniently avaricious or otherwise. "How do they manage the fairies? Dollies on strings?"

"Oh, no. It's another thing they do with the LX. Torch-light Tinkerbells all over the place."

"How dull." Nicola tugged experimentally on one of the vines. "Well, if no one's going to show us the way in, I bet we can climb over the top."

"Didn't whoever brought you up teach you any manners?" demanded the vine in a lazy, just-awake voice. "Before you shake hands, you _ought_ to say, how do you do?"

Before Nicola's astonished eyes, the knotted-together shapes of the vine resolved themselves into a torso and twining arms and long bare green legs. "How do you do, then," she said gruffly, thinking that this was all too Alice in Wonderland for words. "Do you know how we can get into this Labyrinth?"

"I wouldn't bother, if I were you." The vine yawned. "Go somewhere else instead. I'm trying to sleep."

"If you show me the gate," said Nicola cunningly, "I'll stop bothering you."

"What gate?" The vine stretched one leg languidly and bent into an attitude over one toe that Nicola recognised from having seen it demonstrated once by Eve Price of Upper IVB, one of what Lawrie described as the Conservatoire lot. "You want the dwarf. It's nothing to do with me."

"Where is the dwarf?" persisted Nicola. A passing fairy stung her in the back of the neck. She clapped a hand to it. "Ow!"

"I can't say, I'm sure." The vine yawned again. "I _did_ hear that Himself threw him in one of the oubliettes."

"With his own bare hands, I bet. _Cackling_," said Nicola darkly. "Well, if the dwarf was here, where would he say the gate was?"

"Where it always is, I suppose," The vine blinked. Her eyes were extravagantly long , green-lashed and glittery. "You have to ask the right question."

"What goes on three feet at dawn... no, I can't remember the rest of it," put in Lawrie helpfully. "Is it that one?"

"It's nothing to do with that," The vine bounced her back gently against the wall and started doing slow, sinuous arm strecthes. "You have to ask for what you want."

"I want my sisters and Fob back," said Nicola.

The vine executed a glorious full-body shrug. "I'm just a vine, lover. I can't do miracles. Photosynthesis and a bit of light twining, that's my lot."

"How," asked Nicola through gritted teeth, "do we get into this Labyrinth?"

"If I were you, which I wouldn't be, because it's far too energetic - " The vine blinked again, eyelashes folding downward against her green cheeks, "I'd try over _there_."

Nicola looked. An arched, enamelled-looking door stood innocently in its arch in the wall, looking as if had always been there. "Where did that come from?"

"Things aren't always what they seem in this Labyrinth." The vine only closed one eye this time, in a slow wink. She arched one leg out and examined her own spangled and leaf-entwined instep. "Take me. You wouldn't think it to look at me, but my mother was a pelargonium."

"Yes, well, thank you." Nicola hustled Lawrie over to the gates. "Come on. We've only got seven hours."

Inside the walls, a long corridor stretched away in both directions. It was deserted, and strewn with occasional rubble and branches. The vine waved one final tendrilled hand at them over the wall by way of valediction and sprinkled them with something that smelt of apricots and moss. Lawrie was looking despairingly at her watch. She waved it under Nicola's nose. The hands appeared to be doing the mambo.

"I suppose this place runs on Jareth time," said Nicola disdainfully. "Ugh. Rotten control freak."

"Not like you, then."

"I'm _not_ a control freak," said Nicola tightly. "And this is _not_ the occasion to pass on any judgments Tim has made about my character, and anyone who does will be in _serious_ danger of being abandoned, matey. Right or left?"

"Left," said Lawrie at random. "No, right! No..."

Nicola took her arm and marched her firmly leftward, dragging a hand along one wall in case she ran across more lurking surprises. It was a long time before her hand met anything but stone. The long roofless tunnel stretched in front of them forever.

"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered," chanted Lawrie behind her in a Pomona voice, "I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the goblin city. For my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom is as great..."

"Yes, well, don't count your chickens," said Nicola. "Do you think there are six hundred acres of this?"

"Yes, and it feels like we've walked over every last one of them _already_."

Nicola thought about saying that she wished she had Buster and Lawrie had the Idiot, and decided, superstitiously, best not; it was one thing to let herself, or even Lawrie, in for perils, and quite another to risk harming any pony, let alone one as solidly dear as Mr Buster. Besides, Buster _always_ followed the Idiot Boy, and she didn't fancy following Lawrie's lead, not in here. Not that Lawrie seemed interested in taking the lead; she dawdled, complained of a stitch, exclaimed over a broken shoelace... "Oh, keep _up_," said Nicola, just as her hand twitched across air rather than the expected stone. Lawrie trotted up, looked set to trot _past_; Nicola pulled her to a halt. "Look! There's a gap here."

"Oh, yes, that's in the Play. There's one of Tim's puppets that says -"

"You could have _mentioned..._!" Too happy to be genuinely aggrieved, Nicola stepped delightedly through the gap. There was a maze on the other side, a proper maze, not just a long corridor, made of crumbling stone the colour of only-just-toasted bread and honey. The ground was paved and reminded her of a courtyard she'd once been in in Bath. Before her she could see arches and boxed-in junctions and the occasional obelisk.

She put her head back through to tell Lawrie, and found Lawrie teetering on the cliff-edge of a flap. "I thought you'd _disappeared_," said Lawrie chokingly. "I thought you'd _left_ me - because I said _Tim_..." She gulped, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"Yes, well, I haven't, have I? You are a wet loon," said Nicola dispassionately. "Look, it's much nicer through here."

Lawrie followed her, sniffling. Nicola rotated on her heels again, trying to gage the time from the sky. "I couldn't care less what Tim says and I'm not going to abandon you." She ran up a flight of stairs and round a corner, and waved again. "Come on. This is easier than I thought. Maybe we'll do it in six and a half. _Giles_ says, if you're in a maze, you should always turn in the same direction - "

"What if we can't?"

"What do you mean, what if we can't?"

"What if there's a dead end, or..."

"Or what?" said Nicola, moving swiftly.

"Or - one of those..." said Lawrie, mouth forming a panicked O, hand pointing upwards and over Nicola's shoulder.


	4. Chapter 4

"Stop that at once!" exclaimed Ann, marching into the Goblin King's throne room. She was wearing the least ludicrously frilly of the dresses she'd found in the wardrobe of the room where she'd woken up. The dress reminded her, in shape, of the unremarkable yellow taffeta that she had worn to two years' rounds of parties until it got too tight in the ribcage and a grown-up cousin of Patrick Merrick's trod on the hem; but it was a paler yellow, the colour of Devon cream, and much more finely made. The embroidery alone was on too miniature a scale to have been performed by human fingers.

The spectacle of the throne room stopped her in her tracks. Vaguely expecting marble pillars and a strip of red carpet, she looked down instead into a pit of chaos.

The room looked like a rather tatty miniature arena built by a habitually drunken architect. There were ramps and balconies and steps set at various wobbly angles around the walls, and all of them were colonised by goblins. Lines of crusted-looking washing crossed the ceiling, and a very small pig-faced goblin hung batlike by its feet from the chandelier and snored. The place _stank_. Some of the stink was stale beer; some was the chickens and the one black rootling pig who picked its way amongst the crusted filth on the floor, but she was very much afraid that most of it was the goblins.

A throne stood at one end of the room, up a shallow flight of steps and under a skylight. It looked as if it had been made for someone considerably larger than the present Goblin King. Or possibly, Ann thought sensibly, just someone who wore bigger skirts. Its curved stone back was topped with spiralling rams' horns.

Jareth was reclining in the throne with his back propped against one arm and his long booted legs flung over the other, wearing a dirty shirt of the finest linen she'd ever seen, even on the school trip to Hampton Court. His face was turned away, but Ann could just _tell_ from the angles of his shoulders and back that he was looking bored and aggrieved in a way that reminded her of a much younger Lawrie. He looked round. The look on his face reminded her of Lawrie even more. "You're the youngest of a big family, aren't you?" she asked spontaneously.

"You have absolutely no idea." He stifled a yawn politely under long leather-gloved fingers. Ann found herself thinking what a _waste_ it would be if he didn't play the piano. "Stop what at once?"

Ann remembered her mission. Picking up her soft embroidered skirts and reminding herself sensibly that this was _no worse_ than Health Visitors had to deal with on a practically daily basis, she crossed the foul floor towards him. Goblins squawked and squealed and dived out of her way. One quite immense barrel-shaped goblin had to be _rolled_ out of the way by two of his cohorts, into a nasty straw nest that she had previously assumed belonged to the pig. A smaller goblin with wings and a tail flung itself into a pot of beer and flapped about frantically.

Jareth was making three crystals the size of babies' fists circle each other endlessly, round and about his palm and his long clever fingers. Seeing what she was looking for, Ann leaned in over his shoulder. Of all the things in this room, he was the only one that smelt clean. Clearly, _somewhere_ in this castle, there was some soap, then, even if it wasn't available to whoever washed his shirts. Flustered but determined, she pointed down into one of the crystals. "That. Stop that."

Two of the crystals popped and winked out of existence like soap-bubbles. The one Ann was pointing to swelled to the size of a fishbowl. Jareth balanced it on the tips of his fingers. Inside it, a foreshortened Fob was lying on her front on the floor in front of a stone fireplace, engrossedly crayoning in a book held at the proper easel-like angle by two squatting goblins. A calm-looking woman with copper-penny hair and a strong resemblance to Rose sat in a rocking-chair by the fire.

"It's a figment," he explained, sounding as if he thought she was stupid. "An illusion. That's really just a goblin. I can't raise the dead."

"No, there's only one person who can do that," said Ann with absolute sincerity. "And even if it _is_ an illusion, it's _wrong_."

He looked amused. "You say that so often. I wonder what your basis for comparison is."

"Her mother's - gone," said Ann, shying away from the word _dead_. "It's just _lying_ to her to give her that _thing_."

He pressed another yawn away into his knuckles. She wondered suddenly how old he was. Older than Giles, younger than Edwin... She could see the lines waiting under his skin. He looked like he didn't get enough fresh air or sunshine. And he still had that aggravating, Lawrie-like, can't-understand-won't-understand look on his face. "People lie to children all the time, Ann," he said.

"Oh, they don't! Well - yes - I _suppose_ \- about things like the Easter Bunny, and I remember one little friend of Peter's who thought he'd had the same hamster for eight years and it had changed colour twice, but that's different."

"You're only supposed to lie about rodents?" He squinted into the crystal at Fob. "I could give her some kind of giant rat instead if you like. You should see the ones in the Goblin City sewers. They're probably more intelligent than the goblins."

"Don't you dare," said Ann, and realised unhappily at once that he was not the sort of person one said _don't you dare_ to, as it only encouraged him.

He stretched, sinuous as a stretching cat, and rolled his shoulders around so that he was facing her. She had, she realised with a small spurt of unease, his full attention. Ann was really not used to having the full attention of _anybody_ except occasionally when Miss Latimer made her stand up and parse during Classics. She took a step backwards and trod on some squishy part of a passing goblin. It raced off chittering something that Ann was rather glad she didn't understand. There was a lazy challenge in the Goblin King's hooded eyes and she didn't understand that either.

"Sorry," she said automatically to the goblin.

"You don't have to apologise to them. They're too stupid to understand. Too stupid to feel pain, either, or at least to remember it," he said, drawing one glove off and moodily examining his nails.

Any of her sisters except, possibly, Lawrie, would have asked him how he knew. It didn't occur to Ann. "That's not the point. I won't have you terrorising that child and I won't have you giving her false hope," she said. Her heart was banging like a door slapping to and fro in a high wind. But she had stood up - stood up _properly_ \- to Nicola, and by comparison, standing up to what she still wasn't at all sure wasn't a demon was a piece of cake. Ann didn't think she believed in demons; _the potential for evil in human hearts_ was more like it, and she very much doubted that Jareth resided in any human's heart.

Though, she thought with a vague unsteadiness as he smiled at her, he probably could if he wanted to. He had such a _complicated_ face. "And if terror and false hope are all you've got to offer," she finished up firmly, "you can just stay away from her." She bit her lip to stop herself automatically adding _please_. "She's just a little girl."

"Is that what you think of me?"

"I don't know what I think of you," said honest Ann. "Apart from that you'd feel much cleaner and tidier if you got a haircut. And cleared this mess up a bit," She waved a hand at the room full of goblins, who shuffled about and looked squalid. "Or let _me_ do it, even, if someone tells me where the broom-cupboard and the water-butt live. I don't mind, honestly."

"Now _that_ would be amusing." He sprang lithely to his feet. He didn't _move_ as if he were flabby or sick, Ann thought sternly; there was no reason why he _should_ be lolling around in a throne all morning whilst the sunlight could barely shove its way in through the dust.

To her total astonishment, he possessed himself of her hand, bent over it and kissed it. It felt neither pleasant nor otherwise, like having one's hand swiped by the cheek of an unfamiliar cat. "You shall be general of an army of mop-and-bucket goblins." He clapped his hands. The goblins came to attention, in as much as there _was_ attention in a goblin. "All hail Queen Ann. Monarch of the Land of Cleanliness and Lady Executioner of Grime!"

The goblins cheered. Some of them threw their helmets in the air. Some of them threw smaller goblins in the air. Some of them threw fewmets at each other. One of them took advantage of the general din to stuff a chicken down it's ragged shirt and attempt to make off with it. Jareth lifted his arms high to make them cheer again, and threw her a small proud smile over his shoulder, his face with its short hawk nose and discontented mouth turned suddenly vivid with laughter.

It was _just_ like dealing with a small child, Ann thought, with a surprising dawning of confidence inside her. She knew how to manage small children. This was just the same, except that this one was half a foot taller than she was and kitted out with that deranged sparkling dandelion mop of hair, and leather trousers. At least she probably wouldn't have to produce a potty or a hanky for him to blow his nose on, though it was high time that someone provided both for the goblins. "And you'll make that horrible not-dead-thing - "

"Figment," he corrected her absently. "But you shall have a horrible not-dead-thing if you desire one. I expect there's one in the cellar with my grandmother's old things."

"_Figment_, then - you make the figment kiss Fob and tell her goodbye, and walk out and turn back into a goblin and never come back. Or I won't be amusing at all. I shall be dull. You should ask my sisters," said Ann, with the least little hint of bitterness, "exactly how dull I can be."

He regarded her with an unsmiling scrutiny that made her realise that she hadn't plaited her hair that morning. She would have to tie it back if she was going to be cleaning. "I won't have the child bothering me, Ann. If the goblin doesn't watch her, you'll have to."

"I don't mind that. She can help me." Ann wasn't sure how much use Fob would be in getting the castle clean, but she knew she'd sooner have her under her eye than stumping about this madhouse under her own recognisance. "Where are Karen and the twins?"

"In my Labyrinth," he said indifferently.

"Can't you let them out of it?"

He consulted a clock. It had thirteen hours marked on it. He smacked it impatiently on one side. A pair of goblin legs waggled out from the clock's fretted undercarriage and retracted again, and the face flipped round to show seven hours instead. One and a half of the hours were up. "No," he said, startling Ann, who had expected _not yet_.

"Why - excuse me, but why not?"

"Because that's the way it's done."

Ann wanted to ask whether he'd let her go and help them. But there was Fob to think about. He wasn't safe to be left alone with a little girl. Not because - because of anything like that Oxford business, she didn't think - but because he might drop her down a well to see what happened, or be infuriated by Fob's stubbornness and do something hasty. "Will you let Fob and me go, then?"

He raised both winged eyebrows. "And deprive your sisters of what they're fighting for?"

"Oh, what does that matter?"

He lifted a strand of her hair. "More than you know."

Ann tidied her hair back over her shoulder and out of his hand, and faced him squarely. "Mop. Bucket. Broom. _Dusters_. And when did you last have a clean shirt?"

He plucked at the linen. "I don't know. They just appear in the wardrobe, and when I run out I go and kick the goblins." He _almost_, Ann thought indignantly, made it sound like a sensible system. The mismatched eyes glittered. He made to slither the shirt off his already mostly bare chest. "Do you want it for dusters?"

She realised she was being teased. Family teasing flustered her; this, without the potential to cut to the heart, did not. "Don't be silly," she said firmly, and with a curious lightness of heart. The inner ring of goblins around them were still goggling at her; the rest had mostly gone back to their usual slovenly business, whatever that was. She supposed this was what Nick would call being a collaborator. But she couldn't for the life of her see why, if she had to wait here for the twins and Karen to arrive, she shouldn't do something _useful_.

_He_ had sat down to eat with publicans, she thought with the slight curling inner shyness with which she always thought about her faith, and she didn't see that that was any different to trying to make the best of goblins. Though, actually, He'd never been that struck on kings... The goblins formed up into a procession behind her. Jareth took down a dusty standard from the wall and gave it a disdainful look. It was blood-red, as far as she could tell under the crinkling dust, and embroidered with a rather disturbing design involving ravens and skulls. He handed it to a large brawny goblin, who followed obediently at her heels.

The first four broom-cupboards they looked into contained, variously, a headless mop-handle, an indignant cluster of chickens, fifteen giant-sized left boots, an inflatable longship, two copulating goblins, and a sheer drop out over a precipice. The fifth was approximately the size of the Kingscote kitchens and contained any number of goblins mopping, scrubbing, and piloting small multi-scouring vehicles over the gleaming walls and floor. There was a large white apron hanging on the inside of the door. Ann tied it on over her yellow dress. Jareth leaned into the doorframe and covered his eyes. "What _is_ this place?" he enquired disdainfully.

"Cleaning cupboard, Your Most Dire And Perilous Majesty!" saluted a skinny goblin hanging upside-down from the ceiling in the straps of a machine which had nineteen small scrubbing-brushes attached to its spidery legs.

He wrinkled his nose. "Did it ever occur to you to clean the _rest_ of the castle?"

The upside-down goblin looked stupid.

"_Broom_, please," said Ann, resolving to make a start. A goblin riding some kind of goose skidded up and handed her a broom. She half expected it to start dancing like something out of the Sorceror's Apprentice in that Disney film she'd only gone to because Lawrie mendaciously swore it was all about classical music; but the broom remained reassuringly inert and workaday in her hands. She turned to her troops and squared her shoulders.

"Arr, she's-a-pretty-lady," commented a goblin in a machine-gun rattle of a voice. Jareth snapped his fingers at it and it flew away across the corridor and head-first into a large brass vase, where it remained, skinny legs wriggling.

"Don't bully them," said Ann. The King sketched a salute with elegant hand and bended knee, and looked more amused than ever. "Now," she said kindly but firmly to the assembled, boggling-eyed mass of goblins around her knees. "I'm going to give everyone a job, and let you get on with it..."

\--

Nicola whipped round to look where Lawrie was pointing. In front of her, a Thing was wobbling into being. It had a head made of one of the moss-encrusted roundels she'd seen now and again on pillars, and arms and legs made of disconnected lumps of stonework. It was vaguely artist's-model shaped, and at least eleven feet tall, and altogether horrible. When she looked back at Lawrie, Lawrie was standing in a dead end.

"That wasn't _there!_" said Nicola, betrayed. "Is it in the Play?"

One glance at Lawrie's appalled face told her it was not. The Thing danced towards her, marionette-like in its motion. First one blocky foot, then the other, crashed down against the flagstones, bringing knee and lurching torso and swinging arms in their wake.

"That shouldn't be holding together," said Nicola. "Not unless it's on invisible strings or something." She looked around again. There was a rake propped against the decoratively engraved stone wall, in the corner behind Lawrie. "Let's try something. If you and me both get a hold of this and try and poke the main stone out of the middle..."

"The stone in its chest?" squawked Lawrie, gripping the rake in a way that _looked_ pikemanlike and professional even though Nicola knew quite well it was anything but.

"Well, that or its head. We might have to try both. Or knock it to bits altogether. Let's go."

They pounded forward in a terrible rush. The end of the rake bounced against the chest-stone. Nicola thought the shaft was going to splinter. She could already feel a rope-burn-like redness in her hands. "_Push_, Lal," she encouraged, and tried again.

The rake shot forward in their hands. The stone popped cleanly out of its alignment and crashed ponderously to the ground. The Thing waggled one enormous fist then the other, then tapped its feet, adjusting to its sudden lack of torso in a way that would have been comic if it hadn't been so frightening.

"It must be the head, then," said Nicola desperately.

Behind her, Lawrie was all eyes and terror. "What if it's not?"

"We'll _try_." They shoved the rake upwards. Its tip poked feebly at the head. The Thing swung one stone fist at them.

Both twins flung themselves backwards. The fist crashed into the wall and knocked chunks out of it. Two small hairy beings popped up from under a flagstone, chittering indignantly, and carried the rubble away with a tinny chant of 'Hut - hut - hut - hut'.

The Thing knelt and pounded on the flagstones with its other fist. The air shook. "It's hopeless," said Nicola, wishing for once she was going in for languages instead of physics and didn't understand precisely what _made_ it so impossible. "We can't push - "

"We can _pull!_" shrieked Lawrie, inspired. "Whilst it's kneeling down - with the rake bit - "

Nicola flipped the rake neatly over in her hands. Wishing she'd gone in for lacrosse instead of cricket, she competently looped the long reaching fan of the rake-head over the featureless sphere that was the Thing's head and pulled. Lawrie grabbed hold of the rake behind her and pulled likewise, which made her skid painfully into the back of Nicola's knees.

Nicola thought it wasn't going to work. Then, with a shoulder-aching effort from both of them, the head popped free. The Thing's component blocks crashed to the ground with what sounded like a series of small explosions. Nicola and Lawrie fell down likewise, arms flung up to shield them from chips of flying masonry.

Nicola was convinced she saw the head roll busily away as if being pushed by an invisible hand, and grow smaller and brighter as it went until it turned into a glinting crystal; but she decided sensibly that even if it had, there was no use alarming Lal with it. She picked her way out into the unfamiliar junction in front of them and shaded her eyes with her hand.

"Horatio?" said Lawrie brightly.

"I _think_," said Nicola, "we want to make for those stairs over there. If we can."

Lawrie grinned and shrugged apishly. "What about the always going the same way thing?"

"I don't think it works if the walls move." Nicola looked around again. "Oh well. We can but try, as they say. Let's go."

"Tell me something," said Lawrie as they turned yet another corner that swung, infuriatingly, _away_ from the steps.

"If I can and it's legal," said Nicola, years of family life having taught her to suspect that particular gambit out of anyone and _particularly_ Lawrie.

Lawrie tripped over a run of ankle-high stonework and only managed to catch herself by dint of wild flailing and clutching at Nicola. "If," she said when she'd caught her breath, "if he turns up whenever you say the right words..."

Nicola rubbed her arms, which had turned cold despite the sun. "Don't talk about him. I think he's _lethal_."

Lawrie winked. "So do I. Better than all Jennings' concept drawings."

Nicola gave her a shove. Lawrie shoved back, not at all discomposed, and continued. "No, I mean why didn't he ever show up when _Pippin_ said it?"

"P'raps it's the Jess Geddes factor," suggested Nicola, not wanting to discuss it at all, but seeing that if Lawrie was distracted then maybe she wouldn't put on her usual act of yelping and stumbling even over quite easy ground. "No conviction."

Lawrie thought about it. "Neither did I have. I mean, I just said it because it was the right thing to say."

"You have the _strangest_ ideas about that..."

"I mean I didn't particularly want him to nab Ann. In fact, if someone asked me which sister I could spare, I'd have said you or Gin, because if Rowan was gone they might have made me feed cows, and Ann's much better about turning up on the hour with trays of tea and sandwiches than Mum is. I'd _probably_ have said Ginty," decided Lawrie confidingly. "I like you."

"I don't like _you_. Gin was _dead_ on the money when she called you self-centred," said Nicola dispassionately. "Well, I nearly did say it about Ann. But he shouldn't show up for _nearly_."

"Maybe he could show up just a _little_ \- in the shadows, maybe, or a sweep of cloak round a door," suggested Lawrie. "Or send a token goblin."

"I don't want a token goblin."

"We could have used it to get that Ludo counter out from under the sofa."

Nicola frowned. It was a logical puzzle in the middle of all this illogic, and therefore worth considering. "Maybe," she said finally, "it was because Pippin didn't have anything proper to offer him."

"No baby?"

"No baby. Well, only that foul papier-mache one. _Not_ one of Jennings' prop crew's more inspired efforts."

Lawrie, who got to fling the papier-mache baby dramatically about in several scenes, capered happily. "He could have taken Kempe."

"Say Keith and you'd have a point. Or Redmond."

"Or the Lambert."

"I'd make him a _present_ of the Lambert," said Nicola ferociously. "She could sit in the front office of his fatuous castle patronising the goblins and making them wipe their feet."

Lawrie took a deep satisfied breath. "Look! The stairs!"

Nicola saw that it was true. In front of them was a dead end, augmented with another one of those obelisks. To their left was an untenanted square gazebo with vaguely Arabian cutouts in the tops of its walls. To their right were steps leading upwards and out of this part of the maze. She clutched both Lawrie's hands for luck; Lawrie, joyous, clutched back, and they performed a solemn stamping dance.

A chill breath of wind blew down towards them, smelling of snow. Beyond the stairs, they saw a cold, lunar-looking landscape full of fallen masonry and some things that might have been enormous icicles. The top of the stairs were caked in frost. "_Slippery_," said Nicola judiciously. "Are you wearing shoes with any grip?"

Lawrie hopped onto one leg, grasped the other foot and examined it. Her hopping took her onto an adjoining paving-slab; with a cavernous creak, it swung downwards, engulfing Lawrie. Lawrie flung her arms up and shrieked as she fell. Nicola scrambled to a prone position and stared down into the gloom. "Are you all right, Lal?"

"... right, Lal... right, Lal..." her voice echoed weakly back at her.

"_Damn_." Nicola looked around for something to use as a rope.

A crystal rolled past her. She watched it narrowly. It gave a neat upward hop and dropped into a begging-bowl clasped in the claw of a slumped-looking figure in the gazebo.

Nicola approached the figure cautiously. Its chin was propped on its knees. It was wearing a shredded-looking cloak, a slouching tricorne hat with a skull and crossbones embossed into the felt, and an elongated, laughing ivory skull-mask.

"Um, excuse me? Have you got something I could use as a rope?" Nicola asked cautiously. "That cloak of yours? It's already practically in bits - I'll swap you, look, for my cardie..."

"And I thought I had already given you enough rope to hang yourself." The figure seemed to _grow_ like a horrible shadow. Nicola had to work hard not to clench her fists; first in shameful fright, and then in fury. Jareth flung the cloak casually aside as he uncurled his long body and rose to his feet. Nicola put her foot on the cloak, prudently, in case it disappeared. She still might need it.

"How are you enjoying my Labyrinth, Nicola?" he enquired.

Nicola looked at him. He was wearing a _different_ flamboyant coat, this one all swaggering triangular lines like a doublet at the front and long like a cloak at the back, and high sea-boots, and dove-grey leggings that looked as if they were made from the skin of some particularly pliant reptile. "Why don't you wear proper trousers?"

He raised his eyebrows at her and made the face Ann always described as cat-with-creamy, which annoyed her even more. She couldn't _think_ how Lawrie could think he was so super. Real men didn't _prowl_. Or change their clothes fifteen times a day for fun. Anyway, knowing Lawrie, it had probably just been a passing leg-pull.

He leaned companionably against the wall beside her and looked into her face. "So closed. So tightly wound. So much pressure to succeed." He shook his head gently. "Such a pity."

"I was wondering when you'd get round to saying that. Where's Lawrie?"

"Isn't she with you?" He shook his head, his mouth all respectable primness, his eyes aglitter. "You shouldn't let your little sister wander off on her own. My Labyrinth is a dangerous place."

"She didn't _wander off_, she fell through a trap-door that you put there!"

"Then you know where she is. Somewhere below." He made an elaborate downward-flowering gesture with one hand, and snapped it shut again into a fist at his hip. Nicola thought that she'd never heard anyone put quite so much doom-laden emphasis on a word as he did on _below_, not even Kempe demonstrating how to overact to some scalded-looking Lower Fifths who'd previously thought they were being rather particularly poignant. "Turn back, Nicola. Turn back before it's too late. You and Lawrence can walk out of here unscathed. All you have to do is ask."

"What do you get out of this?" Nicola demanded. "I mean, do you _want_ Fob?" She'd always thought Fob was the worst bargain of any of the infant Dodds, though, come to think of it, she wouldn't want to _rely_ on Rose.

"It isn't about what _I_ want." He looked suddenly, immeasurably weary; and then the expression passed, his chin went proudly up, and all the I-am-perfect-and-know-it arrogance returned like the tides. He tapped a riding crop against the side of one booted foot. "A way out of the Labyrinth and your twin back. Make your mind up. I haven't got all day."

"Oh, sorry to take time out of your busy schedule. What have I dragged you away from? Throwing goblins off cliffs to see whether they bounce?"

The tired look passed across his face again, but only for a moment. He smiled instead, nastily, and she couldn't believe he had ever looked haggard at all. "You're taking an interest in my life. I'm very flattered." One of those crystals appeared in his hand; he flipped it over the top of his fingertips and back again. Inside it, Lawrie crouched in a despondent huddle, head hugged under arm, plainly crying. "I'll send Hogbum the dwarf to lead you back to the beginning. Both of you."

"No," said Nicola. "I'll rescue Lawrie myself."

"And what would happen if she ever rescued you?" he wondered softly. "Would the world turn upside-down?" He crossed his arms in front of him holding the crop and crystal as if they were an Egyptian pharaoh's crook and flail. Nicola thought that she had never met anyone more theatrical in all her days and it was no wonder Lawrie fancied him. Though if she did she was _cracked_, anyhow. He rolled the crystal between finger and thumb. "As above, so... below!" he declaimed and vanished.

And she'd thought he'd rolled up enough gloom and doom into _below_ the first time. Nicola blinked. It had all gone dark. It had all gone _damp_ as well, and the no-temperature of caves.

"You rotten _bastard!_" she wailed aloud, realising what he had done.


	5. Chapter 5

Lawrie was pathetically hungry. She had fallen down a hole, and cried, and then inexplicably found herself up above again and bereft of Nicola. She could only think it must have been some elaborate kind of trap, or else - horrible thought - that the walls had moved themselves around again and separated them. She shouted unavailingly for Nicola, but then some things had come bobbing along on the other side of a wall carrying beribboned pikes - the blades and the ribbons were the only things she could see - and escorting some clanking snuffling beast she thought _must_ be a steam dragon, so she had to be quiet. And when she shouted again she _knew_ there wouldn't be an answer. There wasn't.

So she set off on her own; fell in with some kind of large dolorous furry beast who she instinctively trusted because his eyes reminded her of The Idiot's, traversed, in his company, the foullest-smelling bog she'd _ever_ encountered _ever_ and foiled the goblins chasing them (_'that the foul lake / O'erstunk their feet'_ thought Lawrie, not wanting to quote dreggy Ariel but finding a chilly correctness to the words nonetheless).

Then she'd inexplicably lost her friendly beast again and found herself alone in a hushed and spangled wood. And she was _starved_. None of the trees, however much she examined them, looked capable of producing even a single wizened last-year's-apple.

"I, I will be king," sang Lawrie to keep her spirits up as she marched, "and you, you will be queen - " Her voice never sounded tinny or gruff in _her_ head, whatever the Ussher said.

She looked around alertly. You always met people if you wandered into a wood, and at least one of you was usually in disguise. She'd been taken to see enough Shakespeare - even read some of it, not so much for _pleasure_ as in the hope of finding another part like Caliban - and she knew.

This wood was as empty as Lawrie's stomach. Perhaps the drippy lovers and rude mechanicals were off being drippy and rude respectively somewhere else. "We can be he-e-roes," sang Lawrie to herself, feeling so hollow she was surprised she didn't echo, "just for one day - "

Something pale beside a tree caught her eye. She picked her way cautiously over it, suddenly wary for more trap doors. The ground remained steady beneath her flinching feet. She picked the something up. It was a peach. Someone had taken a bite out of it and thrown it away. The thought of someone else's spittle was a bit grue, Lawrie thought hygienically, but she couldn't _see_ any worms. She would just see whether it _smelt_ overripe or black and nasty...

It was the smell that did for her. Her mouth watered helplessly. She was _starved_, she thought, and there couldn't be any harm, and probably whoever had taken the first bite had just fallen down a hole or been carried off by rocs or something, or didn't like peaches. There couldn't be anything wrong with anything that smelt that good. Lawrie closed her eyes and bit.

When she opened her eyes again she was somewhere else altogether. She was wearing a really _enviably_ good principal-boy set of breeches and long flaring sapphire-blue coat, and boots embossed with what looked like frog skulls on their soft turned-over tops that made her reconsider her and Nicola's shared, lifelong antipathy to pirates. An order of merit in the shape of a carved silver owl-head pinned a loose silk sash that crossed from her shoulder to her hip.

Lawrie made a flowery bow to herself in a nearby mirror. The place was _full_ of mirrors, she hadn't realised. Apart from the mirrors, the place looked very much like an attempt to recreate Versailles in a wedding-dress shop. White velvet and dusty silks hung against the walls. Pearls dangled from the ram's horn chandeliers. There was even a tiara perched at a tipsy angle on a grossly elongated skull on a stick, that a fat man in a loose shirt and velvet breeches was running around frightening people with.

She was at the edges of what she recognised, with baby cynicism, as a grown-up party that had got to the _very_ silly stage. Revellers in bunchy brocaded clothing chased each other and shrieked and fed one another grapes. Lawrie thought _what super masks_, and then that this was _nothing_ like Kempe and Ussher's sedate idea of a Ball.

A woman glided by and stared at her, opaquely snake-eyed, over a scaly mask. A man in tattered highwayman finery bowed and offered her sparkling powder from the back of his hand. In the corner, someone who - apart from the tower of soft dark hair looped up with rubies and lace, and the beauty spot on her bosom - looked precisely like Meg Hopkins, giggled over her shoulder at an elderly admirer and made play with a fan.

A couple danced by. Kempe had set aside a chessboard-pattern dancefloor and instructed the extras to avoid it; here, instead, dancers and idlers and the stumbling drunk jostled in the same space. Lawrie wrinkled her nose as the dancers passed. There was only so much that the smell of violets and civet could do to disguise what smelt like a whole day out hunting's worth of sweat.

People were looking at Lawrie. She grinned to herself, rearranged the way she was balanced on her feet, and swaggered into the crowd doing her best Jareth walk. There was a gale of laughter. Delighted with her success, Lawrie was emboldened to more...

Eventually, she escaped from yet another wave of admiring exclamations in order to sit down and catch her breath. Two bird-masked women followed her. They cackled with laughter, saying that she _must_ entertain them more, in high cut-glass voices with an edge of mockery that she hadn't previously noticed. One of them had a horn-handled dagger in her deep bosom, its pommel carved in the shape of a horribly grinning pumpkin-head. Lawrie realised that she had a stitch in her side and that the back of her throat was actually _burning_.

"You must, you must, we love you so!" said one of the women. Her sour hot breath was in Lawrie's face. Her fingernails clutched at Lawrie's hand and dragged like talons. The other woman was playfully entreating help from the fat man and another male reveller with a blond ponytail tied with what looked like a rat's naked tail. The rest of the revellers were turning to look. There was no escape...

There were two people in the room, she noticed, who hadn't paid her any attention at all. One was a man with hair brindled pepper-and-salt - mostly salt - and an elaborate badger-skull mask. The other was an elegant blonde woman who looked a bit like Karen, if Karen wore makeup, which she didn't, and got drunk or - did other things - at parties, which Karen didn't either.

The crowd were dragging her up from the chair. Someone dragged at the sleeve of her coat, tearing it away from its moorings at her shoulder. Someone else ripped the cuff off her other sleeve and crowed, "A souvenir! What will you bid?"

Lawrie looked again, desperately, over an impeded shoulder. It _was_ Karen. "Kay!" she wailed, but Karen didn't look round. Lawrie had never felt more betrayed in her life, which was _already_, she was certain whenever she counted it up, more full of betrayals than other peoples'.

She had to do _something_. The fat man was waggling the horrible skull in her face and begging her to autograph it. What, she thought, would the person who customarily wore this sapphire-blue drag and sparkly eye-pencil do?

Of course, he would do what gentlemen _could_ do when they wanted to interrupt someone dancing. He would cut in. Now all she had to do was keep these horrible, crawling, hungry-eyed people off for long enough that she could get to Kay.

"An impression!" she announced dramatically, catapulting herself to her feet. "An impression of a dancing style, and you all shall guess at it!"

"Will there be prizes?" simpered Meg Hopkins. To Lawrie's immense relief, the crowd backed off, content for the moment just to watch her with hot acquisitive eyes.

Lawrie strode over to Karen and her partner. They revolved, engrossed in each other and nothing else. Lawrie was revolted to see that Karen's cream silk dancing pumps were bloodied at the toes and heels.

"You, madam - _you_ shall be my partner! I cut in, sir!" she improvised boldly and tapped the man in the badger mask on the shoulder.

There was a sound like a giant handclap. Her hand tapped untenanted cloth. A goblin yattered at her and scrambled away, still clutching a pair of comically-too-large buckled knee-breeches up around its waist as it fled. Karen put a hand to her eyes. "Lal..." she began, and then whipped her head round to stare, horrified, at the clock on the wall. It was stuck at thirteen o'clock.

Around them, the revellers were fading and swelling and popping and generally being reduced to either goblinism or nothingness. Pearls popped from their strings; chandeliers shattered; lace and white velvet tattered away as if suffering the ravages of compressed centuries. Clutching each other, Karen and Lawrie fell.

They landed on what looked - and smelt - like a gloomy municipal dust-heap. It stretched away as far as the eye could see in all directions except the one filled with a vista of the Goblin City, under a dust-sheet sky. Lawrie checked herself solicitously for falling damage, but found only one _tiny_ bruise, not worth showing even to Nicola. Rather to her disappointment, her fab outfit was gone - so was Karen's billowing dress - and they were back in cardigan and skirt and jumper and slacks respectively.

Small detritus continued to rain down around them. A trayful of small dainties, some of which Lawrie actually managed to catch; a leather glove ornamented with what looked like frog bones, and a broken fan, which hit Karen behind the ear. As if propelled into clockwork motion, she sat up, put her head in her hands, and burst into tears.

Lawrie shuffled to and fro uncomfortably amongst the foul clutter of junk. She looked at Karen, who was crying still. She wasn't sure what to do. After a while Karen sat up straight, wiped her nose on half of a lace-edged hanky produced by her kind sister from amongst the nameless innards of an upended and tattered once-velvet chair, and said in a muffled voice, "Lawrie - actually - why are you here?"

"Looking for you."

"Oh." Karen looked more disconcerted by this than Lawrie had expected. Lawrie considered her sister; tall, blonde, good at passing exams, not, as far as one knew, possessed of the valour and competence of a Nicola or a Rowan, but still prone, on the whole, to do what she said she was going to; and came to the conclusion that what Karen was discombobulated by was having _failed_. "Jareth - the Play one - says that most people don't get as far as the oubliette, let alone to this bit," she offered. "You did trimmensely well."

Karen folded her hands in her lap and looked about. "Yes," she said in a quenched voice.

Lawrie tried again. "I mean... I know usually you _do_ manage to get what you want..."

"That's what Rowan said, though she didn't put it so nicely." Karen considered. Then, thoughtfully, carefully, almost _formally_, she added, "I suppose the point is that I _most_ wanted wasn't Fob."

Lawrie felt that she was what people called out of her depth. "So - what - you'd prefer Edwin-without-kids, you mean? But their grandmother offered to have them, didn't she?"

"Oh, Lal, it's not that simple. People would _talk_."

"I never mind when people talk," said Lawrie simply, and for that moment at least, believed it.

Her sister raised sceptical eyebrows. "Hmmm. Well. And Edwin - well, Edwin was already convinced that Rosemary's parents were turning the children against him - I can't imagine why I'm telling _you_ this."

"I asked."

"I suppose so," said Karen bleakly.

Lawrie gave the conversation a decent moment to bury itself; and then scrambled to her feet and looked at the distant walls of the Goblin City. "So what now?"

"For Edwin and I? I suppose - we just go from here."

Lawrie clambered up a pile of junk and clung onto a broken weather-vane like a dauntless infant explorer before the mast, scanning the horizon. "Actually I was meaning how do we get into the Goblin City to get Fob and Ann back. And do you suppose I could eat some of this yummy party food that fell like that Moses-in-the-desert stuff from the skies?"

"Manna, I suppose you mean."

"Yes, manna. Or shouldn't we, in case it means when we get out we find we've slept through a hundred years?"

"I don't suppose it could matter less."

Lawrie discovered that the party food had turned into dead bats in her pockets whilst she wasn't looking. Horrified, exclaiming, she flung her cardigan away, bats and all. Karen looked round, irritated rather than alarmed. Lawrie sat down again on her haunches, hugging her knees, gargoyle-fashion, and looked at her alertly, waiting for leadership. None came. "Are your feet all right?" she ventured.

"My feet? Oh, my _feet_." Karen looked down at them as if they'd been installed one day when she was out. "I can't say I'd _like_ to do a great deal of walking."

"Do you think we could make it just over to the gates of the Goblin City and have a look-see?"

"You horribly enthusiastic child," said Karen, not moving.

Lawrie tried again. "Look. Kay. When they came and took Edwin away - because they thought he'd done you in, most horribly, with whatever he could find in the bathroom - he looked absolutely _blanched_. Like his world had been stuck in the back pocket of a pair of jeans and washed by mistake and now it was all in scraps."

"They did what?"

"The police, took him away. I told you."

"You mean - But _he_ said - Jareth said - he'd turn time back, if I got to the castle in time! He said it'd be as if none of it had ever happened - "

Lawrie grimaced and shrugged, since even she could see that _but actually, you didn't make it in time_ was unsayable.

"Oh, my God." Karen covered her eyes. "He'll think - after what happened with Rosemary - I have to get back to him." She scrambled stiffly to her feet, setting off a landslide of accumulated jumble that propelled her to the bottom of the pile.

"_Just_ like surfing," said Lawrie admiringly from above.

"I dare say." Karen struck out towards the gates of the Goblin City, not making much concession for her shorter-legged sister. "I need to get _home_."

\--

Ann looked on the fruits of her labours, and saw that they were good. To her surprise, she also saw, as she smiled kindly on a goblin washing a window with his prehensile feet, that the sky was quite dark over the Goblin City. It was time to give her willing workers a break from their labours. She wiped her hands on her apron. She would find what the castle had in the way of the kitchens, and see about tea.

It was also, Ann thought conscientiously, more than time she looked in on Fob, who she'd left helping to clean up a fairground carousel they'd found inexplicably entombed in an attic. Blobby fist industriously polishing, lower lip thrust out in concentration - _so'm I ponies_ \- Ann wasn't absolutely certain those things _were_ ponies, actually, but it would never have occurred to her to say so to Fob. She hurried up the stairs.

The attic was filled with a sleepy matrix of varnish-smell, candlelight and surprising glints of gold paint amonst the gloom. There was no sign of Fob. Ann gulped. She beckoned a nearby goblin, who was stupidly swiping away with an empty paintbrush at the barley-sugar backside of something that Ann thought was probably a cockatrice. "Where's Fob?"

"_Princess_ Fob, you mean, missie," corrected the goblin nannyishly. "She's with His Awful Majesty."

Ann caught her breath. Skirts impeding her hurrying legs, hand on the newly polished rail, huge shadow to the back of her, she rushed down to the throne-room again.

The room already looked much cleaner. This reassured Ann, though she couldn't think why. Some enterprising goblin had removed the hopelessly wax-encrusted chandelier from its iron chain and hung, instead, a lamp that looked like an enormous glow-worm designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany during a psychotic break in an ironworks. It cast a butter-coloured light that pooled in the centre of the room, leaving the rest to stippled shadows.

Jareth was sprawling in his throne again - had no one ever told him _six feet on the floor_ when he was younger, she wondered? - in a sleeveless robe of wine-red velvet. She was rather touched to notice that underneath it he seemed to be wearing a clean shirt, pinned back at the cuffs with small clusters of owl-feathers.

Fob was curled up in his lap. Ann frankly stared. She had seen Fob awake; she had seen Fob sleeping like a stone; but she had never seen Fob _relaxed_. She was cuddled against the Goblin King's chest with a handful of the robe pressed possessively against her cheek. Ann wouldn't have believed that Fob would let herself go to that extent for anyone except, _just possibly_, Peter. She certainly couldn't imagine a similar scene between Fob and Edwin, though of _course_, she amended hastily, Edwin loved his children.

She realised as his flexible voice rose and fell that he was telling Fob a story. Unable to help herself, she sidled into the room and listened.

"And the stairs quaked under Johtun the Hungry's mailed and booted feet, and he pounded on the walls with his great armoured fist as he roared - "

He paused. Fob gave a sleepy but quite creditable roar.

" - for his wife to bring him his youngest son. 'Bring me the boy that I may devour him!"

Ann shivered. He was almost as good at Lawrie as doing voices. This one was a great gurgling rumble full of butcher-shop horrors. She wasn't sure it was quite nice for Fob to be hearing it. But Fob seemed perfectly content with her bedtime story. She shifted, elbowed Jareth in the chest to make herself more comfortable, and settled her cheek against his robe again. Her eyes were heavy-lashed and her cheeks were rosy with sleep.

"'For I have devoured all of his brothers and sisters, and I will make a bowl from his ribs and a spoon from his bones and eat his heart to make me stronger, for I am Johtun, the Goblin King, son of Ammante the Cruel.'

"And so the Goblin King's clever youngest son hid from him that night inside the left leg of the Goblin King's spare suit of armour, and lived to see the dawn. But the _next_ night Johtun the Hungry came softly to his bride's chamber - " His voice, by some alchemy, conjured the enormous padding feet, like those of some relentless beast. Ann almost thought she saw the great lamp flicker to his shadow. Jareth's voice dropped again; the same cavernously deep voice, this time wheedling, heavy with promises and lies. "'Bring me the boy that I may make him my heir. Bring him to me, that I may crown him, and put my sword in his hand,' he said. But the Goblin King lied..."

Ann shivered. She turned back towards the doorway, not wanting to hear any more, and scurried away down a staircase. _But the Goblin King lied..._ She didn't think she'd ever get that voice out of her head.

But Ann, unlike her sister Ginty, was blessed with the ability to put her worries sensibly aside; and though this didn't actually make the worries go _away_, it at least allowed her to get on with things in the meantime. Of course, she was worried about Fob - and about Karen and the poor little twins out there in the dark, and about her mother and Rowan and Ginty left behind, and _especially_ about Rose and Chas. She was even worried when she realised with a twinge of duty that she'd _forgotten_ to worry about Edwin. But she had a kitchen to find.

As it turned out, this was harder than she expected, because there wasn't one. Ann eventually managed to piece together, by asking various goblins, that the guard ate in their barracks, the King either demanded extravagant meals at strange hours of the night or forgot to eat for days on end, and everyone else made their own rather squalid arrangements. According to Ann's goblin informants, this meant that they ate raw birds' eggs from the roof, various unpleasant fungi and small crawling things from the cellars, and the occasional leg of chicken stolen from other goblins; unless they had any money, in which case they sent out to pie-shops in the Goblin City for much the same fare, but hot and doused in dubious gravy. Ann rather wished she hadn't asked. None of them had even _heard_ of the idea of a cup of tea, though one goblin thought there was a cauldron somewhere that Himself's grandmother had used to make herself weird infusions in the dark of the moon. Not wanting to get involved in _any_ way with that, Ann retraced her steps towards the throne room.

Neither Jareth nor Fob were there. Thoughts trip-stepping in front of her, she worried through the various possibilities - off taunting Nick and Lawrie, throwing Fob in the Bog of Eternal Stench, something worse...

Two landings up, she met Jareth coming down. He smiled at her. "She's asleep," he said. It was such a _domestic_ thing to say that it almost embarrassed her. It made her feel that they were connivers in more than caring for Fob. Not wanting him to see her conscious blush, she turned and looked at the two large paintings on the landing. One was of an extremely beautiful, wicked-looking dark-haired lady holding a mask that looked as if it was made of iridescent beetle-wings; the other was of a suit of armour - she couldn't tell whether there was a man inside - with one of those dog-faced jousting helmets. Except that this helmet, unlike any of the ones that Ann had dutifully sketched long ago during IIIA's project on Arms and Armour, had a mouth full of long, bloodstained teeth.

"Who did the paintings?" she asked at random. "I mean - sorry - but they don't look like goblin work."

"They appear when the Goblin King dies," he said indifferently. He looked up with disfavour at a final, shadowed, empty frame. "Frozen in one shape for all of eternity and back again. That one will be mine, when Queen Fob the First rules over the Goblin City."

"Oh, _no!_" said Ann, distressed. "You can't - her parents - "

"Died, abandoned her, and begged me to take her away respectively," he said silkily, propping a hand against the wall and leaning in towards her. "Whereas I will love her. Care for her. Make her a Queen."

"You told me you couldn't be bothered with her!"

"But I told _her_ how the Goblin King's clever youngest son saved himself by hiding in the pipes of the Castle organ six times in succession, because she liked that part best. All the way from _for I am Johtun to the Hungry_ to _because the Goblin King's son loved music._"

_Because the Goblin King's son loved music..._ "Does he?" Ann found herself asking, looking at the silver and bronze device - moon? horns? she wasn't sure, though she'd seen it before, he wore it as a pendant - that held the robe closed at his throat, because she still couldn't look at his face.

"He does." He made a dismissive gesture. The clasp and the silvery, spidering tips of his hair shifted against the red velvet. Underneath it, she found herself thinking, he was _far_ too thin. "But music's wasted on goblins."

The blush at last receding, Ann looked up into his face. "There are other - um - creatures out there. You showed me Nick talking to them. Why don't you talk to them - I mean - why don't you try - "

"There is _no one_ for me to talk to," he interrupted her with bored arrogance, "except for every now and then when some indecisive moppet offers me a child and then changes her mind. On which occasion, I change my very being for her pleasure, put trials in her way, and end up having a couple of strained conversations with a person who hates me. There is no one else."

Candlelight filled his face with swooping shadows and turned the velvet robe a harlequin patchwork of different reds, flame and plumskin and morocco book-leather and a rich dark red that was almost chocolate. Ann took a breath. "There's me," she said.

"You?" He raised his eyebrows mockingly. They disappeared into the moonlit tangle of his hair. "Don't pity me, Ann. I can be cruel."

Alarmed, flustered, Ann stood her ground. "That's nothing to boast about," she said as firmly as if she'd run into a smallish Peter and an even smaller school-friend tormenting flies. "Did Fob have anything to eat before she went to bed?"

"Hot milk and a peach."

That sounded all right, even to Ann, though she couldn't help thinking a banana would have been better. Then again, she wasn't sure she could face the things that goblins might bring back in mistake for a banana. She realised that she was _very_ hungry. "Are there any peaches left?"

Jareth gave her a rather odd look. "I believe I can do rather better than that." He summoned a crystal and sent it bouncing away down the stairs. "Will you dine with me, my lady?"

"Is there time? I mean, won't Nick and Lawrie..."

He took out a horned pocket-watch and stared at it. His eyes narrowed. He tapped it hard, looked pleased with what he had done, and stowed it back in his pocket. A great stillness covered the castle like snow. In his face she could see a manic, balancing-act daring, as if he had done something quite irrevocable and was waiting to see whether he'd got away with it. A complicated face, she'd thought before. It was even more complicated now. He offered her his arm with a small bow. "There is time now," he said.

Well, she supposed he knew. A little constrained, but supposing that this was no different to _very_ formal parties, she slipped her own hand into his arm. His sleeve was crisp and soft under her fingers. He _had_ put on a clean shirt.

Together, they descended the staircase, into the smell of heartsease and rich roast meat and sauces made with wine.

The castle slumbered around them.


	6. Chapter 6

Nicola found that she was sitting down against a wall in a place that smelt of wet stone and cobwebs. Something spidery ran over her hand. With an exclamation of disgust, she scrambled to her feet and slapped at her skirt to get rid of the dampness; and then, rather unavailingly, tried to do the same by her back. He'd _swapped_ them. So now Lawrie would have to rescue her. She had an awful feeling Lawrie's rescues would be on a par with Lawrie's bowling. She put a hand against the wall again to steady herself and had another go at dislodging drops of moisture from the back of her neck.

"That's my nostril, if it's all the same to you," said a booming lugubrious voice.

Nicola jumped backwards. "Sorry - I thought it was the wall - " she said, supposing that finding a large stone person down here was no more surprising than anything else that had happened.

"I am the wall. I'm a Phony Warning," said the voice. It was a bass voice that sounded as if it went with a drooping moustache and a profoundly pessimistic outlook. "Great big faces carved into the wall. You might have heard of us?"

"No, sorry."

The voice heaved a disappointed sigh. "Ahem. Go no further! Turn back on pain of direst peril!"

"You couldn't tell me which _way_ is back, could you?" asked Nicola cunningly. "It's hard to tell in the dark."

"Is that your left hand up my nose or your right?"

"Right."

"Go the way you're facing," said the voice; and then, in an affronted mutter, "It doesn't sound half as good as _turn back_."

"Thank you! That was incredibly helpful!" said Nicola, turned round, and set off determinedly in the other direction.

As she carried on down the corridor at a jog-trot, she thought with a private, silent grin that doing _this_ for Ann would offset every occasion on which she'd come down late and found Ann had done her share of setting breakfast, every suitcase Ann had kindly unpacked, and every other unasked-for and infuriating bit of martyrdom, ever. _Bit of martyrdom_ wasn't fair, she supposed - Ann seemed to enjoy it, gruesome type that she was - and it wasn't as if Nicola took advantage of it as often as Lawrie did - only when it was absolutely life or death stuff - but still, Ann was a drip, Ann was too Pollyanna by half, this was the last time she did anything like this for lousy Ann...

Gradually, Nicola couldn't say how, she realised that this had transmuted itself into the cross thought that Ann shouldn't _have_ to take on everyone else's responsibilities as well as her own. Ann should have _something_ just for herself. Look, Nicola thought, at the way she'd wanted to give back her Guide badges. Though, actually, even their mother found trying to make Ann see that a bit of a slog, so Nicola couldn't see how a mere sister would _begin_ to put it...

Her running feet, having churned her thoughts into order, brought her to a tunnel intersection. Winding passages snaked off in at least five directions. Nicola picked one and followed it; some minutes later she came to another similar bewildering mess of options. Or perhaps it was the same one. No, this one only had three ways to choose from. No helpfully floodlit signpost presented itself; this way to the Goblin Castle, that way to certain death... Nicola thought, thinking how it might be so; but even if there had been one, she wouldn't have trusted it.

When in doubt, she thought, remembering Peter in Bacca Cave, go the way that smelt freshest... Feeling like all kinds of a fool, she solemnly sniffed both the ways that she knew she hadn't come from. They both smelt exactly the same, but one seemed to have more of an upward slope than the other, so she chose that. A few feet down the path, the floor suddenly hummocked and started heading decidedly _downward_. Nicola retraced her steps and tried the other way.

It led to another intersection, this one with _eight_ paths counting the one in the ceiling and the one in the floor. Nicola only found the one in the floor with her toe, and had to sway back onto her other foot with a feeling like missing a step at the bottom of a flight of stairs. "Honestly, it's like being inside an _octopus_," she said, crossly, aloud; and then giggled; Miss Boyd, who was Ann's form-mistress and taught Science, would have told her at once that being inside an octopus was completely different. For a start, it involved more ink.

There was a breeze. She paused, holding herself as consciously still as if the breeze were a shy dog that needed to be encouraged. Yes, it was _definitely_ there. It was coming from one of the passages on the other side. Back to the wall, cautious, Nicola edged herself round the hole in the floor and sniffed again. It wasn't wishful thinking. The air _did_ smell fresher. Encouraged, she loped down the passageway, not minding even when it turned out to be even more downward-sloping than the last one.

Light pooled greyly on the floor in front of her. It seemed to be finding its way in through a low arch with a gate that reminded Nicola of a sewer-grating. She hurried towards it, and found, to her surprise, that it swung easily. There must be someone around here, then, Nicola thought, spirits rising, even if they only popped down to oil the odd hinge.

She was standing on the banks of an underground waterway. It flowed, gunmetal-coloured and solid-looking, from one end of forever to the other, under a canopy that reminded Nicola - though she couldn't think why - of a railway station. Candle-lanterns hung at intervals on the railway station's sodden brick walls. And - glory _be_ \- there was a convenient boat. It was tied up a little way along, being regarded solemnly by some kind of hairy dolorous boatman, a tatty-looking toy rabbit, and a thing that looked a bit like a blue tiger with a short spiralling horn in its forehead. There was also a large lettuce; it didn't _seem_ to be taking a particular interest in the boat, but after the vine, one never knew.

"Hello?" Nicola waved and approached them. The boatman, the tiger and the rabbit all jumped, though the tiger then tried to pretend it hadn't.

The boatman pushed back the hood of its tatty leather cape and regarded her with boot-button eyes. "Did _he_ send you?" it asked in a weak squeaky voice.

"Did who send me?"

"Himself. His Awful Majesty."

"Oh, _him_. No. What's the matter with your boat?" It looked quite river-worthy to Nicola.

"It's not big enough. I have to transport Palestrina here over the river..." he indicated the tiger, who stretched itself out in a sinuous dip-backed bow with its huge clawed paws thrust out - "and this rabbit and this lettuce, and I can't leave Palestrina with the rabbit..."

"I can't help it, it's my nature," said the tiger Palestrina in a syrupy voice that didn't sound as if she was trying to help it particularly hard.

"... or the rabbit with the lettuce." The rabbit bounced up and down and chittered in a way that made Nicola think of Monty Python films.

Nicola felt a giggle in the back of her throat. She did her best to politely suppress it, as she'd never seen anyone more woebegone than the boatman. She'd known _this_ puzzle since Peter first tried it on her when she was six. "Why don't you take the rabbit first, and then come back for Palestrina and the lettuce?"

"Well, I _would_, but I've only got one set of arms." The boatman looked morose. "S'not fair. There's creatures in here with _seven_... The rabbit thinks it's a fish, see. Tries to dive into the water as soon as we're under way."

"Oh." Nicola managed, by a frantic fingers-scrabbling-on-edge-of-precipice effort, _not_ to get dragged into the lunacy by saying _but fish don't eat lettuce_. "Well, how about I hold on to the rabbit for you? Does the path on the other side go towards the castle beyond the Goblin City? Or back to the maze with all the obelisks?"

"I can't remember." The boatman blinked and hunched his shoulders to and fro nervously. "How many legs on an obelisk? Are they those things with the poisonous stingers?"

"I'm feeling _hungry_," dark-treacled Palestrina.

The boatman scratched his furry brow. "Well, if you _would_ hold the fish -"

"Rabbit," corrected Nicola, though she couldn't think why she was arguing about it.

She picked up the rabbit, which felt warm and solid and actually _less_ mad-eyed than some of the jowly creatures that laired in Noah's Ark. It made a couple of feeble attempts to spring into the water during the crossing, which Nicola foiled easily; it wasn't anything _like_ as wriggly as either Tessa or Daks. The bottom of the boat, inexplicably, was filled with glinting copper coins, which couldn't, Nicola thought, have done much for its seaworthiness. At one point they were attacked by a small sea-serpent, which the boatman drove off with his pole, but they reached the other side without mishap. The boatman touched his brow to her. "Best of luck, miss. Now, if you'd just mind the rabbit until I get back with Palestrina and the lettuce..."

Nicola found, watching the water, that she was very thirsty. It looked a bit dishwatery and unappetising, but she'd drunk river-water before and not been any the worse for it. She shifted the rabbit to the crook of one elbow and dipped a hand in the water. It glittered unchancily.

The boatman waved and shouted. Nicola paused, hand still pooled full of water. The boatman poled to a halt. "Don't drink the water!"

"Don't tell me, Jareth relies on people not getting to the castle beyond the Goblin City because they're incapacitated with stomach cramps?"

"It's the Waters of Forgetfulness." The boatman wiped his furry brow. "You let even a drop of that water touch your lips and you'll forget who you are and what you're doing here. Forever."

"If she forgets who she is, can I assume she thinks she's a rabbit and eat her?" yawned Palestrina, baring rather a lot of teeth.

Nicola snatched her hand out of the water and wiped it furiously on her cardigan. She called out rather hurried thanks to the boatman, handed over the rabbit and fled away down the riverbank and out through another arch, very glad to be away from all of _that_ lunacy. It wasn't even _funny_ like some of the encounters she'd had, it was just _weird_. "Honestly, everyone in this Labyrinth is _off their head_," she said, aloud, and then giggled, because that included Lal and Karen, and very possibly, by now, herself...

She wished she knew where Lawrie was. If only Lal could manage a Mr Rochester-like voice saying _I'm in the northwest quadrant behind the biting fountain, if you need directions ask the goblin in the information kiosk_. Or if they felt what the other one was feeling, like twins in a rather drippy book, though Nicola wasn't sure she felt like letting herself in for _that_, considering the Dying Swan act Lawrie put on over even such minor woes as stubbed toes and splinters. Come to that, she wasn't _mad_ keen on having a spectral Lawrie lollygagging over her shoulder at some of the things she felt when she was with Patrick...

"Hel-lo!" said a jovial voice out of the gloom.

Nicola looked upward, blinked, and found herself facing a cylindrical shaft. It had a small doorway at the bottom and small round windows set at intervals above each other all the way up, which made it look like an enormous upside-down stone version of Rose's recorder.

"Can we give you a leg-up?" asked a deep, stupid voice from inside the shaft. "No, that's not right..."

"Can we give you a hand?" corrected the jovial voice. Nicola slid through the doorway. Inside, the walls were crusted with strange waving finny fungi. One of them grabbed at her leg. She looked down. "Stop that!"

Several of the fungi on the wall next to her made an obliging shape and spoke to her. It looked like a mad blobby face, with a fist-like nose and a mouth made of two sets of scissoring fingers - they were _hands_, she realised - "It's what we do," it informed her. "We're Helping Hands."

"Up or down?" asked another face, this one with wriggling fingers forming a sea-lion moustache.

"You'd better choose quickly," added another.

"Up, then, please,"

"She chose up!" chanted the Helping Hands in chorus. Nicola and found herself being hauled and shoved and dangled all the way up the shaft, into more and more light, and popped out again at the top. The topmost fringe of hands waved to her.

She seemed to have emerged from some kind of chimney-pot. She looked down and around her. She could see cluttered, medieval-looking streets; zigzagging alleys and strangely canted fairytale rooves and signs swinging in the evening breeze. Nicola clambered out onto the roof and hugged her knees, full of a heart-catching, incredulous, bubbling awareness of luck.. Here she was - what _trimmense_ luck - in the Goblin City itself - and more to the point, joy overwhelming, this must be what London had looked like to Nicholas, if he climbed onto a roof ever.

Hugging her knees, she wondered where Lal was. Probably still wandering around the stone maze, getting more and more lost. But it was _dark_ now. She didn't have _time_ to go back. As long as one of them made it, surely everyone would be rescued. Nicola waited for a party of rambunctious goblins to clear off out of the street and into some kind of bottle-shop, then slithered and bumped down off the roof, getting dirty and surprisingly sharp thatch under her cardigan and scraped up the backs of her knees.

She would have to remember that ridiculous speech of Pippin's, she thought, as she waited for another crowd of goblins to stop coffee-housing at an intersection, and then crossed it at a crouching run and hid behind a water-butt. How did it go? _Through perils untold..._ was it perils? She wasn't sure it was perils. Still, the Play had been wrong about enough things so far, it might have been wrong about this as well. If she just went in there and told him to send everyone home _now this instant_ in enough of a form-prefect voice, that would probably do. She darted into the shadow of an overhanging lath-and-plaster upper story and pressed her back to the wall. In a lighted window opposite, goblins caroused in dumb-show.

The castle was close now, rising up out of the streets like a great tree with roots of rock.

_All I have to keep doing is putting one foot in front of the other and not do anything stupid_, Nicola thought sensibly. She waited for a dung-cart with several goblins fossicking upside-down in it to pass by, and calculated her trajectory towards the next shadow.

The world resounded like a great silent bell. The carousing goblins stood still in silhouette. Candles no longer flickered. Dogs froze motionless in mid-scratch. Even the steam from the dung-cart ceased to rise. Nothing moved, nothing thought, nothing breathed.

Not even Nicola.

\--

The dining-room was cavernous and gloomy, and lit by drifting bubbles of light that rose and fell like thistledown. There was a large fireplace that Ann would have been glad to see a cheery fire in, but instead it was full of three slumped and slumbering goblins. It really was extraordinary, Ann thought, the positions that goblins were able to sleep in. That one there was obviously sound asleep, immobile as a figurine, with its hands still clutched about a chimney-sweep's brush. She was glad to see the brush, as she had been rather afraid the goblins cleaned chimneys, when they cleaned them at all, by forcing small goblins with skinned elbows to climb up and lighting fires under them.

A goblin butler was likewise asleep, on his large clawed feet, behind Jareth's chair. If one could call it a chair. It was more like an only slightly cadet cousin of the throne in the throne-room. Ann sat at the other end of the long polished wood table. The food was served by silent, attentive invisible servants. Ann found this rather uncomfortable - of _course_ she didn't believe in banning childrens' books with wizards in or anything of that sort, but she couldn't help thinking that this kind of magic was encroaching on the things of God. It was - arrogance, she thought, cautiously working it out in her head - to do things by magic that could perfectly well be done by the work of hands.

Though, she thought unhappily, looking down the table at the Goblin King, if she told him he was arrogant he'd probably take it as a compliment. She decided that she really ought to mention the kitchen at least, even if it wasn't any of her business to go prying into the state of his soul. "I don't mean to be rude - "

He inclined his head a little and watched her with a look in his eye that reminded her of the Thirds delighting over Nicola's hawk, and raised his crystal glass to her. "I have never seen you as anything but - almost - _too_ concerned to spare other peoples' feelings."

The invisible hands were filling _her_ glass now. Ann, only used to wine at Communion and Christmas, considered asking for something else instead, but she didn't want to make a fuss. She tasted it. It was nicer than she'd expected. "Well, I - um - why don't you have a kitchen in the castle? I'm sure it'd make things easier for the goblins."

"There's no point in making things easier for a goblin," he said with absolute contempt.

"It would make things easier for you and Fob, then," Ann persisted.

"So you think she _will_ stay with me?"

"No, of course I don't," said Ann, flustered, and drank a mouthful of the wine too fast. It had an aftertaste that was more like the way redcurrants smelt when they were sun-warmed and newly picked than the way they ever tasted. She felt unexpectedly warm inside.

He regarded her with unholy amusement. "I got rid of the kitchens after I succeeded my father. You really wouldn't want to know the sort of equipment he kept in there."

Ann didn't suppose she did.

Still with that look of wonderment on his face, he began to talk lightly about other things. After hearing about his attempts to form a goblin orchestra, Ann had to admit that no, perhaps they _weren't_ the ideal creatures with whom to share a love of music. She was particularly appalled by the story of their attempts to play a piano from the inside. She told him, in return, shyly, but with increasing confidence when she realised he was actually _interested_, about the school choir's preparations for the Festival next term, and how she and Terry Hunt had been allowed to actually _coach_ the Junior Choir whilst Miss Ussher was busy with the Play, rather than just showing up to make the required noises on the piano, and the time she'd found Jodi Wright of IIB in _floods_ backstage after a disastrous rehearsal because she was convinced her voice had broken.

"Though Miss Ussher's a bit off with me because Nicola won't do Choir," she added thoughtfully. "I think there's some politics behind the scenes there, because Nicola's a Prospect..."

"A what?"

"Oh... she'll get coaching for the cricket team, when the weather's better... and you can't really do that _and_ Choir. I heard Miss Craven saying _But, my dear woman, surely you must agree that we have a duty to provide exercise for their entire bodies and not just their lungs_ once... I suppose that's gossip," said Ann, looking down consciously into her lap. "And in any case, Nick _wouldn't_, even if there wasn't any cricket. She doesn't get nerves about much, but she does about singing."

"And how is any of this your problem?" he enquired bemusedly.

"Because staff always _do_ think you can get your sisters to do things and that you know _why_ when something's wrong. Especially if you're the oldest still at school. It's all very well if it's Lawrie or Ginty desponding - sometimes I _do_ know what's wrong - but I never know with Nick. And she really is something special. Her voice, I mean."

"_She_ is something special? Yet another plucky heroine done in a style I am tired to death of."

Ann fired up in indignant and slightly incoherent defence of her sister. He listened, his fork arrested between plate and mouth, with a look on his face like Miss Ussher hearing angels sing the _Magnificat_; but when she asked him the why of that expression, he went all cold and proud-looking again, and muttered "You sell yourself short." And she really couldn't make head nor tail of that.

The rest of the meal passed easily and surprisingly pleasantly. If it wasn't for the various worries that still ballooned occasionally inside her, she would have counted it as one of the most wholly successful meals she'd ever spent. And as for Jareth, he might be a quite enlightened ruler, Ann thought, if he only had someone who was willing, occasionally, to laugh at him.

"You don't seem to _like_ being Goblin King very much, do you?" she said finally in the tone of voice that she used when her dormitory babies were being silly. "Why don't you go and do something else?"

"Being the Goblin King isn't something I _do_. It's something I _am_."

"You mean you'd stop existing?" asked Ann carefully.

He shrugged and started peeling an apple with a knife whose blade was worn to a thin moonlit sliver. Ann remembered something Lawrie had said once whilst stomping round the dormitory being aggrieved with Miss Kempe - _almost immortal but less than human_ \- and felt an enormous pity well up in her, huge and silent as the tides. "Are you _sure_?" she asked worriedly.

"I am sure of nothing," he said so softly that she almost didn't hear him. "And you are sitting there wondering how to ask me whether I have a soul, you delightful thing. I haven't had a rousing theological debate since someone accused me of being one of the Nephilim in 1748."

"And are you?" asked Ann, breath catching in her throat. It was suddenly terribly important that she should know.

"I am my father's son. _And there were giants on the earth in those days_..." he quoted lightly.

Ann drank some more of the wine and took a spoonful of some cream-and-honey concoction that had, up to that moment, been delicious. Now, it tasted like sandpaper. "I am so sorry," she said, and meant it.

He threw the peel neatly over his left shoulder. It hit the goblin butler in the eye. He didn't stir. Jareth pushed the huge chair back and came towards her, soft-footed, owl-silent, the red robe billowing behind him in the gloom. Ann felt her heart beating. He took her hand. For the first time she understood that baffling business about alchemy and humours in the poems of Donne that they had done their best to tease out with Kempe the term before. _All others, from all things, draw all that's good_... She honestly felt that there was some flowing brightness that lifted within her as she rose, and passed through her tingling hand to his.

"Let me show you my Labyrinth, my lady," he said, looking down at her as if he were learning her face by memory. She could still feel that strange, silk-gold-moonlight feeling flowing out of her where her hand touched his, like a river of fireflies going home. "The heights and the depths, the follies and the gardens and the crypts. Give me this one night. Let me _show_ you."

"What if Fob wakes up?" she asked breathlessly.

"Are you _totally_ immune to everything I have to offer you?" he demanded.

_No. Oh, no. No_. "Look. I... Your Majesty..."

"_Jareth_," he said on an exasperated outward breath.

She looked up into his face as he had looked into hers, learning the short curve of the nose, the discontentedly long upper lip, the way the ends of his mouth tucked in with the promise of laughter. "Jareth. This is all - honestly, it's like you said. It's just that I'm the only person in..." She found there was a soft obstacle in her throat that made her unable to say _centuries_. It might, she thought soberly, be millennia. She felt a ridiculous, squeamish urge to cry. "... in years, who isn't either a goblin or someone who hates you. There's honestly no reason to behave as if I was Ginty. Calling me _my lady_ and kissing my hand, and - It's just silly."

"Silly?" The dining room shredded away around them. The dining table fell away sideways, spilling white roses out of its tarnished silver vase; the walls folded themselves up like origami. Jareth's robe and sleeves flared dramatically in the wind that stirred his hair. His face made a hard proud shape in the air. But his hand was still warm and strong in hers, and Ann found herself - not entirely _sensible_, she admitted ruefully, but at least, mostly unafraid. "Silly? _Silly_, tra la la?"

Ann risked looking down at her feet. She was standing in emptiness, on something that looked like part of a glass jigsaw-puzzle. "There's _no_ need for you to carry on like that."

"Who," he demanded dangerously, "is Ginty?"

"My next-youngest sister."

"The one who desponds?" he enquired with that devastating ice-water politeness. "She sounds unutterably depressing. I detest lachrymose females."

"No, no, I didn't mean that at all! I meant, she's..." Ann paused, realising that _she's the one who's worth looking at_, whilst she thought of it as just the plain truth, would oxidise to self-pity the moment the words hit the air. "She's the sort of person who likes that kind of thing," she said instead. It sounded schoolmarmish, but that was better than the alternative. "Flowers and compliments and things like that."

"Did it never occur to you once," he said in a cold, frustrated, tamped-down voice, "that I might, just for once, be considering what _I_ want?" He drew her closer by her hand. Her feet ran forward of their own accord, taking six steps to cover what would usually be two, towards him. The yellow dress _was_ too tight over the ribcage after all.

"It seems to me," said Ann with a sort of gasp, "that you _often_ get what you want. Food provided by magic. Goblins to polish your boots. All sorts of people and - beings - to bow before you and quiver when you frown. The world to fall apart when someone calls you _silly_. It doesn't seem to make you very happy."

He narrowed his eyes. The world flew together again. They were standing on an open balcony high up amongst the Castle's turrets. There was a chill in the air. They looked out over the Goblin City with its still lights, and the ruched and intricate surface of the Labyrinth stretching away beyond. His hand had not let go of hers, not for a moment.

"But you could," he said, his gorgeous voice so low that she hardly heard it, only felt it like a shiver on her skin. His other hand stroked her cheek in a moth's-wing caress. Above them the moon stood still.

She found herself thinking _and would you let Fob go if I promised to stay_? The worlds were breath in her mouth. She couldn't say them for fear of the answer. She wasn't sure how much of what she was feeling was the almost reflexive desire to be the one doing the sacrificing, the one put in the way of inconvenience, because she _knew_ how much she could bear but was never sure of anyone else's tolerances; how much was the wine and the magic; and how much, packed tidily away like next summer's uniform, was what she herself wanted.

She unpacked it and looked at it, that new-minted thing. He _looked_ like a rather punk-rock tragic hero, she thought, as she looked into his unmatched eyes and felt as if parts of her were falling away into a cold ocean like calving icebergs. She was honest enough to admit that that was part of it. She had always vaguely thought that the sort of man she liked was clean-cut and decent-looking and didn't stand out, like the boys from the Minster choir school who Kingscote occasionally had debates with, and that the reason none of the ones she'd met had appealed to her was that she wasn't interested in that kind of thing _yet_. It was a great shock to find that _actually_ she seemed to prefer men who she couldn't bring home to tea without a distinct trepidation about how Mummy and Mrs Bertie would take it. It didn't at all fit with how she thought of herself.

He was the first man who'd ever been interested in _her_, and that was a part of it too.

But it wasn't the whole, nor even the most important part. He was clever and lonely and actually probably quite an enlightened ruler, at least by comparison to the homicidal standards of Johtun the Hungry and Ammante the Cruel. And he had effortlessly won Fob's trust. And he loved music.

He was too old for her; and, at the same time, in many ways, about five and a half. He was proud, and very frequently self-pitying, and appallingly easily bored. Most heart-shaking of all, she wasn't convinced he had a soul.

But still, she wanted to save him. Or at least to be there at the end of his achieving, once he'd saved himself. She wanted, she thought, coming to the true heart of it, to know him better. To be _friends_ with him, at least, she wanted that. She wanted a world in which he wasn't penned up here with no one to talk to but goblins and she wasn't stuck like Andromeda on a rock waiting to be rescued. She wanted _time_.

And time, she realised with a sharpness of breath, was precisely what they didn't have. She looked up at the unmoving wisps of cloud against the unmoving stars. No breeze stirred the air. No light down in the Goblin City flickered. Ann's eyes widened with horror.

She snatched her hand out of his. It felt like ripping a plaster off an unhealed cut. "What have you _done_?"

"I have reordered time itself," he said wearily, as if it was part of a script.

She hurried to the edge and looked out again, to make sure. It was all there still, unmoving as a set from Lawrie's play. She wondered how they could have eaten the food earlier. It certainly _felt_ as if it was all one indigestible lump, trapped in an uncomfortable stasis inside her. There were vines twining up the side of the castle that she hadn't noticed before. She couldn't believe she'd been so _stupid_. All of those goblins, asleep - frozen - like something out of _Sleeping Beauty_. Except that it was the King who needed rescuing from himself.

He was standing behind her, his hands clasped around the tops of her arms, a safe haven in case she should fall. She felt as if all the warmth in the world would forever come mediated through linen and red velvet and owl-feathers and the smell of his tinsel hair. "I did it all for you."

"But I didn't ask you to!" said Ann, and then, realising a lot of things about the way she'd often behaved herself - though one couldn't _really_ compare sewing in Ginty's name-tapes to stopping Time Itself in its tracks - "Oh."

"Just let me rule you," he said in her ear, "and you can have everything that you want. Just fear me - love me - do as I say - "

"That isn't what you want," said Ann. "That's just all you think you deserve."

With a sound like a great bell tolling, the world came alive again.


	7. Chapter 7

Nicola nearly stumbled. Her foot felt as if it had no momentum at all. For some reason she felt as if a great deal of time had passed in the slice of time between that moment and the last, though she didn't see how it could have done. The noise and bustle of the Goblin City rose again around her - had they been silenced? No, how could they have been? - and someone in the rickety building behind her started playing the accordion.

As she inched into the shadows of the plaza in front of the castle, she noticed three things. Firstly, that the castle was wound about, to at least the level of the third storey, by twining briars the colour of wrought-ironwork; secondly, that the two guards outside seemed almost as disconcerted by this as Nicola was herself; and thirdly, that two cloaked figures were standing in another shadow on the other side of the plaza having a brisk discussion about it. Intrigued, Nicola crept round towards them, and was startled, having thought herself entirely quiet, when the shorter one suddenly sprang on her.

There was an interval of confused fighting, after which Nicola found herself staring at Lawrie and Lawrie at Nicola. "I pretended I hadn't noticed you!" rejoiced Lawrie. "And I fooled you, didn't I?"

Nicola reluctantly let go of her sister's collar, which she was gripping through a layer of greasy cloak. "You are a proper charlie!"

"Come down this alley where the guards won't hear us," said the second cloaked figure, pushing its hood back and revealing itself to be a distinctly hollow-eyed Karen. "Nick, how did you get here?"

"Hardships untold and perils unnumbered, like Pomona says," said Nicola with what both her sisters evidently regarded as quite unnecessary levels of cheery resilience.

"_Dangers_ untold, it is," said Lawrie reprovingly, "and _hardships_ unnumbered,"

"Well, it felt like perils at the time, I can tell you. How did you two - "

They explained their adventures to each other whilst Karen foraged down an even smaller sub-alley that led to a goblin coal-hole. She returned hauling several of the largest lumps of coal she could find, tied up in the cloak like a sack. "Are you two still mad keen on netball?"

"I wouldn't say _mad keen_," demurred Nicola, suspecting a slick adult over-simplification of the way things were, though Kay was only two years out of Kingscote herself and ought to have known better. "I mean, we still do the form stuff. But we're both too old for the Junior team - Jenny Cardigan's captain now - and you need to be Lower Five, really, before you get even a _sniff_ at the Second Seniors."

Lawrie made a face. "I wouldn't want to sniff any of the Second Seniors. Not just after a match, anyway."

"But you wouldn't mind it the rest of the time?" said Nicola smartly. "And talking of sniffing..."

"Oh, we found these disguises in the midden outside the Goblin City," explained Karen.

"That accounts for the smell, if I may say so."

"You may. So when we got to the gates I made Lawrie do her 'I am the Goblin King incognito, but it'll be boiling oil all round if you don't recognise me,' act to fool the gate-guard, like Haroun al Rashid."

"Who he?" asked Lawrie blankly.

Nicola gave Karen a politely sceptical look. "_You_ made Lawrie...?"

"You have no idea how good she is at making people do things when she puts her mind to it," said Lawrie, looking orphaned and pathetic.

"I dare say," said Nicola, abandoning the idea of even _trying_ to understand this particular kaleidoscope twist in the family arcana. "So why the sack of coal, Kay?"

"I thought we could lob coal at the guards."

"To make them go and investigate a sound round a corner?"

"Just to drive them off, I thought."

"It'll take us longer to get through that 'orrible foliage than it will for them to yomp round a corner and find there's no one there," said Lawrie, gloomily Eeyorish but undeniably right. Nicola squared her shoulders. She selected the biggest lump of coal she thought she could throw and twisted her hands in towards her chest in preparation to throw with the proper clean outward push. "Are you two ready? One - two - _throw_!"

The goblin guards scattered under the rain of coal. It started to rain. With Karen in the lead and the twins making a sort of arrowhead behind her, they marched up to the gates. Gates and wall alike were thick with dark brambles. Karen turned to Lawrie. "Does the Play say anything about this?"

"No, said Lawrie. "There's a battle instead. But it's _usually_ about finding the right words."

Karen narrowed her eyes and stared at the spiny morass in front of her. "I've come for my little girl and it's past her bedtime," she said, "so you can just _bugger off or live to regret it_."

The briars slithered back to reveal iron-bound doors. Karen gave them a push. They opened. She looked back at the twins, an expression of pleased but strangely shy surprise on her face. "I suppose those must have been the right words."

"I suppose they were," said Nicola, nearly as surprised herself.

As they reached the deserted entrance-hall, a clock began to strike. Began to _toll_, Nicola thought, might be more like it, except that only bells tolled and it didn't sound like the sort of a clock that had a bell in. They ran up the stairs, the sound of their feet and of their pounding hearts blending together into one long frantic drumroll. "I'll say the words," said Nicola over her shoulder.

"But I'm the only one who knows them," protested Lawrie, quite ready to let Nicola take care of any dangerous confrontations with enraged Goblin Kings, but still feeling a workmanlike desire to do right by the script.

"Well, tell me, then, quick. Through perils..."

"It isn't perils, I keep _telling_ you!"

"Well, hardships, then." The clock continued chiming.

"The hardships come second! Look, Nick, I've heard Pippin dozens of times. _Really_ I should do it!"

"But it's _my fault_," said Nicola tensely.

"No, it isn't," said Karen. "It's mine."

The stairs stopped. The next landing was a platform in mid-air. Around them was a whirling carnival landscape. Walls and ceiling were filled with distorted, candystripe shapes. Giant jack-in-the-boxes lolled from the walls. an empty ghost train roared between two arches shaped like contorted faces, and below them a carousel spun endlessly by upside-down.

"This suits Jareth," said Nicola savagely, looking at the opposite wall, which bulged out impossibly into a big-top roof. "He's a clown."

Karen was looking downwards. Far below, clinging to a barley-sugar pole on the back of a rearing cockatrice, was an upside-down stout small figure. Karen ran to the edge. "Fob!"

The carousel whirled faster. It lifted from the floor like a spinning-top and veered away towards one of the horrible jack-in-the-boxes. The jack-in-the-box was waving twin cleavers.

Karen jumped.

Lawrie wailed, seeing Karen falling and the ghost-train whirling up on its tracks to meet her. She buried her head in Nicola's shoulder and clung on hard enough to make Nicola's chest feel unpleasantly constricted. Nicola poked her with a finger behind the ear. "You are the original clinging vine! You can let go, she's all _right_!"

Lawrie disengaged herself, not looking as sheepish as most people would under the circumstances. Both of them found themselves watching Karen land on the ghost-train's track and scurry downwards, dodging razor-edged trapezes and a flock of carnivorous-looking balloons. Nicola pressed thumbs to give her luck, and thought that if she'd had Ginty's four-leaf-clover she'd have made a sacrifice of that. The track twisted eye-bendingly upwards under Karen's running feet, turning, Nicola was certain, through at least one dimension that it shouldn't have.

"It's not _fair_!" she said grimly under her breath.

Lawrie shook her head, evidently unable to say anything at all. Now the carousel was spinning by under Karen's feet. She looked; wavered; and jumped again, landing beside a grinning unicorn. The twins took a small sharp breath. The carousel spun even faster.

The beasts on the carousel lurched outward and tried to bite Karen as she passed. She had to step dangerously close to the edge to dodge the painted heads with their rolling eyes and enormous rocking-horse teeth. The carousel itself began to swing faster yet, in an irregular dipping motion. Doggedly, clinging hand by hand to the poles, Karen made her way onward around the outside of the circle until she faced the cockatrice.

Its eyes flashed light. Nicola and Lawrie clapped hands over their dry-sick mouths in a parallel, identical horror that they would have found amusing had they been able to watch themselves, but no, there was Karen, surprisingly resourceful with a hand-mirror. The twins breathed again.

Fob reached out to Karen. Karen reached out to Fob.

The carnival shattered.

Nicola found that this time she was the one clinging to Lawrie's hand, whilst trapezes and some things that she thought were bits of a Big Wheel and fragments of damp, brilliantly striped and chequered nonsense flew away past them and Lawrie looked quite unconcerned. "This is all just like last time," said Lawrie interestedly. "_Ow!_ Stop digging your nails in! Clinging vine yourself, you're a _blackberry_ bush!"

"M'sorry - _what_ last time?"

"Don't grab any canapés, they'll only turn into bats," said Lawrie, completely incomprehensibly.

Karen was there with them, carrying Fob straddled across her hip. Fob's head was nodding close to Karen's shoulder and she looked very nearly asleep. Nicola was unsurprised to note that even in that state she looked mutinous. Ann was there too, wearing, Nicola saw with a sort of hot shock, a dress that _suited_ her by as much as Doris's greeny-blue silk suited Ginty and the Disaster suited Nicola herself. She found herself feeling an incomprehensible dismay which was swept away as for the first time in at least ten years she found herself wholly and uncomplicatedly glad to see her sister Ann. She stepped forward. "Ann. Look, about what I said... I'm sorry."

"Oh, let's forget it," said Ann at once. Nicola submitted to being hugged, but realised with a second shock part-way through her penance that Ann too seemed rather preoccupied. She was looking around her. Nicola looked too. They were in a broken marble no-place, like a ruin seen in dreams. Nicola followed Ann's gaze. Far above them, she could see an owl flying.

"He was too proud to say goodbye to me," said Ann with an exasperation shot through with fondness that Nicola couldn't begin to interpret.

The owl landed on a ledge above them and turned, in a storm of feathers, to Jareth. He was wearing a white cloak that looked rather feathery itself, and looked white with exhaustion, which made Nicola think fierce cross thoughts along the lines of _serves you right_.

Lawrie finished whispering to Karen. Karen stepped forward.

"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City, to take back - to take back - " Karen squared her shoulders. Jareth listened gravely. The droop of his shoulders reminded Nicola of Regina on a day when it rained. She felt rather sick. The last thing he deserved was anyone's sympathy.

"To take back _my daughter_ who was stolen," said Karen, settling her arm more firmly around Fob. "For my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom is as great, and everyone deserves to make a mistake now and again, damn it."

"Are you saying that marrying the father of the child was a mistake?" he asked softly. The cloak and his blanched hair fluttered about him.

"That," said Karen, "is absolutely none of your business."

He looked amused. "Very true. It's not. But how am I to give you the child? You are here, but not within the thirteen hours we agreed. Your time has run out, Karen Dodd."

Karen looked disconcerted.

"Ours hasn't," said Nicola, her voice feeling ridiculously husky as if she hadn't used it in days, which couldn't be further from the case. "You made a bargain with _us_. Kay and Fob and Ann to go free, and no one turned into a goblin."

"None of _them_ have been transmuted." He jumped down among them, landing as softly as if he weighed no more than the owl, and made a gracile bow. "And all three are free to go. Just as I promised." From the glint in his painted eyes she could see that he was up to something. She braced herself for whatever it was. "I made no such assurances concerning your fate or that of your sister Lawrence. And you forgot to ask for them."

"You can't _do_ that!"

He gave a proud little lift of his head. "I can do what I like. I'm a villain."

Nicola gave him the look that meant _compared to the villains I've seen you're nothing, matey_. Beside her, Lawrie looked hunted. "Is he going to turn me into a goblin? I can't be a goblin. I'm going to be a famous actress."

"Or," he said, smiling at them with a wild glint in his mismatched eyes like a man staking everything on a desperate gamble, "we could make another bargain."

"Stop that right now," said Ann in the voice she might have used to a Chas who was overexcited but not actually naughty. "No one is going to make any more bargains on anyone else's behalf. They solved your Labyrinth. Of course you're going to let them go."

"_Throw them back_ might be more accurate," he muttered. He made another crisp, dismissive little bow to them. "Lawrence. Nicola. I trust you enjoyed my Labyrinth."

"I don't think we'll be visiting again," said Nicola grimly.

He _smirked_, there was no other way to describe it. "So you say now. But little girls grow up."

Whilst she was still outragedly searching for a reply for that, she found that he had utterly dismissed her from his attention and was making a much lower, more formal bow to Ann. They talked, low-voiced, for what seemed a colossal amount of time during which Ann mostly seemed to be shaking her head, and then he bowed again and kissed her hand. In another storm of owl-feathers, he was gone.

"What was that about?" asked Lawrie curiously.

"I'm not going to tell you," said Ann. Lawrie looked astonished. Nicola tried to work out quite what had happened and came to the conclusion that somehow they had all rescued each other.

"Well - I suppose this is my job now - " said Ann. She turned to a clock on an ivy-covered wall behind them that Nicola hadn't noticed before, and turned the hands firmly almost a full circle backwards. It felt as immense gears were turning somewhere far below. The world moved.

\--

They were back in the upstairs sitting-room. The clock showed 8.35, just as it had when they left. The Ludo board was still on the windowsill where they had left it, though the light through the window was no longer thundery but a burnished and altogether un-March-like gold. Lawrie turned an ecstatic flick-flack and landed neatly on the other side of the footstool with her arms flung triumphantly up as if she'd just won a gold medal for a Peoples' Republic, oblivious to Ann's reminding murmur of "Not inside!"

Just as it always did, the indefinable smell of Trennels - stone and the grass outside and lovely Tessa, and Mrs Bertie's floor-wax - enveloped them completely before retreating as if it had never been. Nicola took a long ecstatic sniff. "Home," she said in a voice as deep as Fob's, and then, cautiously, deferring to Ann and Karen to save another row even though their ideas were liable to be yucksome and exhausted respectively, "What are we going to _say_, actually?"

"That I woke up under a hedge and wandered home with absolutely no memory of how any of it had happened, I suppose," said Karen. "I don't see what else I can do. We can't go telling the police some taradiddle about goblins."

"But they'll probably send social workers, because of Fob," said Ann sensibly.

Karen looked as if this hadn't occurred to her. She settled Fob onto the sofa, flopped down beside her and massaged her own brow with her fingers. "I can't _think_! Do you think I should say it was masked assailants in a van?"

"But that'd be wasting police time..." demurred Ann.

"Say Fob was ill and you brought her over here to see what Mum thought, and you left a note by the telephone for Rose and Chas but they didn't find it, and then you were so tired you both fell asleep in the attic," offered Nicola.

Karen looked dubious. "It sounds a bit thin."

"So do both the other things."

This was, indubitably, true. Karen rubbed her brow some more. "Well, Little Black Sambo might have just as well have eaten a note. Goodness knows he eats everything else."

Lawrie looked at the clock, yelped, and rushed out of the room, reappearing to her dumbstruck sisters with one arm into the sleeve of a waxed jacket and the other one scrabbling in the pocket for change.

"Where do you think you're going?" asked Nicola.

"I'm getting the train into Colebridge. I should just make it if I scuttle and I pretend not to see anyone who says hello to me in the village. Has anyone got 40p?" Lawrie looked around her sisters' faces, which were variously pained, offended and too tired to care. "I'm not sticking around for all that woffle. I don't _begin_ to see how you make it convincing."

"But you can't possibly," said Ann.

"She's right, you can't," added Nicola, finding that she felt rather less than her customary irritation at ever having to back Ann up. "Mum'll want you there when she's counting heads. You _know_ she will. Besides, if the police come back and you've sloped off, you'll be No.1 Suspect."

Lawrie looked briefly disconcerted; then shoved her other arm into the jacket and hopped from foot to foot. "_Aren't_ any of you going to lend me the 40p?"

"You must see you can't," persisted Ann.

"You could say, ever so convincingly, you'd heard feet on the stairs in the night and not realised it was Karen and Fob," suggested Nicola.

Lawrie made an untempted face. "It'll make me feel sick just listening. One of you can tell Mum I'm all right and I'll be back on the twelve-forty."

"Oh, let her _go_," advised Karen heartlessly. "It's her own feeble row if she does."

Lawrie looked astonished and hurt. Ann, concerned, indignant, began "But she shouldn't _want_ to - " and then, almost to herself, with a look of discovery, "But that's the way it is."

Fob woke up and yawned cavernously. "Why am I asleep _here_?" she demanded in a strong blurry voice.

"It's time for breakfast," said Karen with a briskness that suggested she'd had a lot of practice, in the last ten months, at answering unanswerable questions. "Are you hungry?"

"_Jareth_ can do my breakfast. Goblins-not-soldiers."

Before Karen could disentangle this, they all heard feet hurrying up the stairs. Mrs Marlow came in looking careworn; saw Karen and Fob, and sat down in a chair looking as though she might faint. Ann ran for the first-aid box and Lawrie for brandy, some of which she drank on the way up the stairs, and it was left to Nicola to run for Rose and Chas, who arrived in a happy relieved exclaiming rush preceded by Tessa and Sam like foam in front of a wave. The sun shone through the window and the room was full of glad amazement.

\--

The rest of that term passed by; another followed, and Nicola's and Ann's paths mostly avoided each other, one being joyously busy with her new place on the cricket team, and the other - less joyously, mostly due to Miss Kempe's intransigence over finding it convenient for rehearsals to take place in the Theatre - with the Choir Festival. It was late in the summer term when Ginty remarked to Nicola in the dormitory one sunlit evening, "How long has Ann had that super paperweight?"

"What?" asked Nicola, paperweights not usually being the sort of thing Gin exclaimed over.

"The round glass one with the owl's wing sort of etched inside it. It's not flat at the bottom like a proper paperweight, it's round all over, and on a little filigree stand. It looks like it cost a _bomb_," said Ginty enviously, flopping onto Lawrie's bed. "Was it a Grandmother present? I saw it when I went down to see if she had my Latin dictionary."

"I bet she said we weren't supposed to borrow,"

Ginty gave a reminiscent grin. "Yes, she did, _and_ that I was disturbing her dormitory babies' virtuous zizz... I asked her was it a crystal ball, and she said no, and not to be so silly... Oh, _there_ it is! Why on earth should my Latin dicker be under Lawrie's pillow?"

Still exclaiming over this minor mystery, it did not occur to her to wonder why Nicola should stand up and stare out of the window by her bed, so furious that all her feelings were written clearly in the angles of her back; nor, later, when Nicola was _still_ there long after Lawrie slept, to say anything more than "I don't know what's up with _you_," and then, by way of absolving herself of responsibility, "It's your funeral if Matron catches you."

Nicola gave no sign of hearing her. She remained, looking out into the owly dusk, until she thought she saw a figure neither Staff nor School standing out beyond the nets, with the last of the light on its spiked pale hair.


End file.
